Really fun demo. Do yourself a favour and ignore Hond’s review. I have no idea what they’re talking about or why they’re so filled with hate.

I’ll go negatives first - It definitely needs optimising, but I was getting a pretty smooth 55 fps on my 4060 RTX on medium settings with DLSS set to “Balanced” on my Ultrawide at 2560 x 1080. Also, why is it having to precompile shaders every time I launch it? I found at least one hilarious bug where a mountain bike would suddenly appear glued to the front of the bus sideways when I pulled into a bus stop. And that’s it… pretty much.

The rest of the game is really fun. I’ve been looking for a decent Bus driving game (not so much sim) for AGES. Also, going into this I had no love for Sabre Interactive. They absolutely ruined Dakar Desert Rally. What a horrible mess that game turned out to be! I have to admit though… they’ve redeemed themselves a little with this demo. At least I think so.

So, the good things that come to mind are…

It worked immediately with my T-248 wheel. No messing about with confusing settings like in THE BUS. It just worked and it was really easy to adjust all the settings.

I love how you have fixed side mirrors but you get a temporary mirror that appears only when you indicate and only on the side you indicate. It works really well and doesn’t clutter up the UI when it’s not needed. ETS2, for example does offer UI mirrors but they’re either on or off and not cleverly tied to the indicator like in this game.

The people in the town look good and walk around naturally. At least a LOT more naturally than the pedestrians in BUS SIMULATOR 21. There’s also a decent amount of people and a nice variety of cars as well.

I love the town itself. It feels like a city that’s buzzing with activity and looks really nice. The lighting is great and the sunshine and rain effects feel perfect to me. Compared to the weird plastic town feel of BUS SIMULATOR 21 this is a breath of fresh air. I wanted to love BS21 so much but I just couldn’t play it because the environment was so jarringly fake feeling.

I also really liked the game loop. How you unlock extras routes and buses by getting “likes” from your passengers for each bus stop by following all the good driving rules. It made me want to keep driving the routes till I’d filled up each bus stop’s “Like” meter and got that all important star. I also really like not having to fiddle about with change and tickets for passengers because bus travel is free in this game. I really didn’t enjoy BS21 where you have to get up and go check each passenger for tickets and figure out if anyone’s trying to ride the bus for free. I just wanna drive man!

I’m really excited to see how they improve this game and for an early access demo this seriously impressed me. It feels like there might FINALLY be a good bus game on the horizon 😁

Wouldn’t that get into all the circuitry of my hard drive? Also, kudos to Microsoft for figuring out how to “literally” build an operating system out of poop. That’s amazing…

G-Rebels demo is back. I just love how nimble the ship is in this one. Fully upgraded you can get up to insane speeds with it darting around the cyberpunk style city. Personally I think they should make more of that, so that you can fly through more narrow gaps and maybe even underground tunnels. Also I’ve been watching their Discord for a while and they seem to be really going full steam ahead (no pun intended) with this one. Can’t wait for the full game 🙂

Absolutely. Also, I’d love to make it a rule that you can’t start a review with:

“I really wanted to like this game but…”

Aww… Did you pumpkin? Are you SO disappointed that you don’t get to like a thing you wanted to like? That must be so rough for you. Anyone using that opener is immediately suspicious to me.

You’ve just reminded me actually, there was a game I loved playing the demo for called “Truck World: Australia - First Haul” I saw back in June that got hugely review bombed (maybe by ETS2 fans?). “Worse than a mobile game” and “It’s way too red” were two I remember 🤣

I believe how it works is people buy the game, write the negative review and then refund it. Review bombing is not only definitely a thing but Steam have gone to great lengths to combat it, which would be odd if it was imaginary.

Oh ok 🙂 It was Seafarer: The Ship Sim. A day after they launched they got a load of negative reviews that took them down to a “Mostly Negative” rating. That’s improved since then, presumably once more genuine reviews came in.

Really well explained thanks! 🙂

That’s good to know.

Didn’t want to mention the name of the game cos some might claim I’m stealth marketing for it or some bs like that.

Anyone know who the “third party” is that Renault is refusing to name? Also, I wonder why they are refusing to name them…

Played the demo of Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream a while back so might buy it now it’s 20% off. Not surprised it got “Overwhelmingly Positive”. Bloody excellent game.

It doesn’t get much more snowflakey than when you threaten to bomb the UN because an escalator didn’t work 🤣

Maybe it’s just all these years being stuck in this darkest timeline, but all that headline translates to in my mind is “Trump decides Putin is weak enough for him to have a go at re-negotiating his pee-pee tape deal with him”. Putin will either push back or fold and when he does then Trump will just “change his mind about Ukraine” again. So to summarise… meh.

Yeah some of those comments are insane… 😲

This is the sort of thing that caught my attention:

STAR CITIZEN is Getting DESTROYED by No Man´s Sky The TRUTH About Star Citizen vs Starfield vs No Man´s Sky No Man’s Sky Just Changed Space Games Forever with Voyagers 5 Ways No Man’s Sky Outshines Star Citizen’s Overpriced Dreams

See, this is why I keep struggling when I’m telling someone about something I heard on here and they ask if it was on reddit

“No… it was on erm… well… it’s this other place. It’s not reddit… thank God it’s not reddit but it’s called erm… well it was Mbin and then that shut down and then it was kbin and now I’m on fedia.io but actually it’s lemmy… but it’s part of the fediverse… I think? it’s… yeah it’s like reddit basically but it’s not… anyway this asteroid is going to zip by the earth later today. Here’s a live youtube page that’s tracking it” 🤣

Maybe the reveal will be that it was made entirely with AI? Shenanigans vibes for sure…

This seems deliberately bad. It kind of reminds me of those games designed to prove a point about Steam or something “HAHA Nobody saw the trick I was playing on them. I made this game in 20 minutes and thousands of people wishlisted it.” That sort of thing? I could be wrong though. Just feels like it’s something along those lines.

Quick update apparently 5 days later, I’ve now played 55 hours of this… Such an addictive game! 😁