New York Bus Simulator

I went in with low expectations, and New York Bus Simulator still managed to both exceed and disappoint them in roughly equal measure. This is TML-Studios at their earliest and most experimental, before they settled into the polished European Bus Simulator template. The entire game is built around one route: the M42 line, crossing 42nd Street from the Hudson to the East River in a Nova RTS T 80-260 bus modeled with more care than you'd predict from a title of this age. The cockpit is fully rendered, controls are mapped, and the rotatable camera view gives you a reasonable sense of sitting in the driver's seat. Dynamic weather and a day-night cycle round things out visually, though neither is anything to write home about by modern standards. The strangest and most genuinely interesting decision here is the story mode. You play as Carlos, a recently hired Manhattan bus driver who stumbles into a nine-chapter narrative that gets unexpectedly dark. The writing is cheesy, and the voice recording quality is rough at best, but the sheer audacity of hanging a plot on a bus simulator earns some respect. Story segments alternate with actual driving shifts, which keeps things moving better than a pure free-drive structure would. Newcomers to the genre will also find the tutorial surprisingly considered: rather than dropping a controls list in your lap, the game walks you through the basics with a depot colleague coaching you step by step. For first-timers curious about vehicle sims, this is one of the gentler entry points you'll encounter. That said, the limitations of age are hard to ignore. Timetable pressure is minimal, passenger ticket management is simplistic, and the AI traffic feels thin. The lack of dynamic mirrors is a real omission for a driving sim, forcing you onto keyboard shortcuts to check your flanks. Community reports also flag launch issues on modern Windows setups, with QuickTime dependencies causing crashes that require manual workarounds. The Steam user base is tiny and mostly quiet, which means troubleshooting is on you. There is a vehicle editor bundled in, and a virtual radio station called Double Bass FM with over 40 tracks to keep you company on the route, which are small but welcome touches. The overall experience, one bus, one street, one city patch, will feel claustrophobic to anyone who has spent time with later entries like Bus Simulator 21 or even TML's own European Bus Simulator. Who is this actually for? Hardcore vehicle sim collectors who want to trace TML-Studios' origins, and very casual players who want a low-stakes, low-commitment driving loop with a novelty story mode attached. If you are coming from any modern bus sim expecting depth of scheduling systems, route variety, or mod support, you will find almost none of that here. The active player count on Steam peaks in single digits, mod ecosystem is essentially nonexistent, and no meaningful post-launch updates have landed in years. Approach this as a historical curiosity with a surprisingly decent tutorial and one oddball narrative gimmick, and it delivers on those narrow terms.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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