City Bus Manager Early Access Preview

An early access preview code was used, with many thanks to Noovola Net.

City Bus Manager is a simulation economy game by PeDePe GbR, a small development studio in Europe. The game is published by Aerosoft GmbH, which is known for publishing addons for Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Build a Bus Empire

In City Bus Manager, as the name suggests, you build and run a bus company. A tutorial leads you through your first steps into running a successful bus company. You’ll start by picking a city or town to construct your bus station.

The blurb on the game’s Steam page says you can play your hometown or any famous city worldwide (except China) with OpenStreetMap data. It was that statement that drew me to the game; who wouldn’t like being able to build a bus route around their own city?

Build a Bus Station in your City, or Maybe Not

As yet, that’s not entirely true; I imagine it will be implemented eventually since the game is in the early access stage. You can choose a country in the world to base your company in. However, not all towns, cities or even countries are available.

So when I went to pick my home city of Belfast, Northern Ireland, it wasn’t available. Next, I decided I’d like Dublin, which was also unavailable. In the end, I plumped for London, and I couldn’t play on that city either, as it wasn’t on the list. So that was a little disappointing, and I ended up building my bus station in a little town in England.

Employ Staff

Once you have picked the city to build your bus empire, you start constructing the bus station. Next, you create an office and facilities for your staff, bathroom, kitchen and locker room.

Then it is out to the service yard to build bus parking slots, bus wash, fuel pumps, and a warehouse. In addition, you’ll hire bus drivers, cleaners, office staff and mechanics. Most important is building the Service Center, where you sell tickets directly at your depot. Then, you’ll buy a few buses, and set up your first bus route. It’s best to set up your bus route on the map using the points of interest, as you will see your passenger numbers grow.

Map out Bus Routes

It is standard simulation gameplay when it comes to constructing your bus station. The controls are a keyboard and mouse, and there are a few choices of furniture and items to place in the office and staff area.

As you play through the game, you earn gold trophies. Using the awards, you can research the tech tree. The tech tree allows you to buy bigger buses like bendy buses and more.

Clean, Repair and Customise the Buses

You also have to keep the buses clean and repaired. You’ll buy stock for the warehouse so your mechanic can repair the buses and keep them in tip-top shape for your customers. You are not in competition with other bus companies, something I feel is missing from the game; you rely on customers to leave a rating of up to three stars.

The rating a customer leaves depends on how their bus journey went, punctuality, ticket cost, and the bus’s cleanliness. You can also customise the busses’ livery, change their colour and add logos to make your mark on your bus company.

Early Access

Since this is an Early Access game and still being developed, you can see that as you play the game. Every so often, I had info panels pop up in a different language than English, meaning I couldn’t read them. In addition, the game would randomly switch to the loading screen while I was playing and return to the game. While it’s not game-breaking, it did interrupt my immersion in the gameplay.

The staff AI can be a bit wonky at times, particularly if they aren’t doing any jobs. They wander around aimlessly, going from one room to another, looking like they are lost.

On more than a few occasions, I had staff members getting stuck in the office corner with an icon above their head saying they couldn’t find a path. Yet when this happened, there wasn’t anything visible like a piece of furniture blocking their route. Little things like that show the game still needs a lot of work to perform well.

Apart from the niggles I’ve mentioned, City Bus Manager has all the qualities to eventually be a good time sink. I enjoy tinkering with the bus routes to get the most efficient route, and sending out a clean and shiny fleet of buses to keep the customers happy.

City Bus Manager is released in early access on Steam on the 10th, of November 2022, you can check the game out on the Steam page here.