OmniBus

I've spent enough hours with build-order charts and tech trees that a game stripping the input set down to literally two steering keys should feel like an insult. OmniBus is not an insult. It is, however, one of the most brazenly narrow design statements I've encountered from a Devolver-published title: left, right, and nothing else, while an unstoppable bus accelerates until the simplest corner becomes a catastrophe. The speed climbs continuously, and once it peaks around 205mph, the slightest graze off a pinball bumper or jump pad sends the vehicle tumbling into orbit. The only fail states are landing on your roof or exiting the map boundaries, which sounds forgiving until the third time a ramp yeets you sideways off a skyscraper level. The structure is a single-player story mode built like a themed world platformer - each world has its own setting, and almost every individual level hands you a different objective with no repetition of the previous one. You will rob a bank, knock a giant gorilla off a skyscraper, harvest space corn on the moon, and transport astronauts to a wedding. Each of those is a distinct mechanical puzzle shaped entirely around the fact that your bus cannot brake. A handful of special bus variants add a second input: the Gravity Bus lets you redirect downward force relative to whichever side the underside faces, which opens up wall-riding and aerial propulsion. A double-decker tourist bus full of passengers you can fling appears later. The variety is genuine and the level designers clearly knew the core loop would go stale without it. Free Play trick mode and a local four-player demolition derby and trick-scoring multiplayer round out the package. Where the game earns its 55 on Metacritic is the physics. Intentionally chaotic physics in a comedy game is a design choice, not a bug, but the line between 'delightfully unpredictable' and 'outcome determined by random bounce angle' gets crossed more often than it should. Critics noted that skill has a limited role in several missions, and the randomness of collision results means a level you beat cleanly on one attempt can brick you for twenty minutes on the next. The final gauntlet, which chains several stages in a row with no mid-point saves, stretches that frustration to its furthest edge. Player reception on Steam is considerably warmer than press scores - around 80 percent positive from several hundred reviews - which tells you the audience going in with the right expectations (short, silly, chaotic, couch-friendly) walks away satisfied. For a strategy player like me, the honest appeal is the per-level puzzle framing. Each stage is a contained problem: given this map geometry, these hazards, and this bus variant, what routing solves the objective before the speed makes it unsolvable? That mental model makes the game more tractable than its chaos suggests. Run times are short, the story mode clocks in around three to five hours depending on retries, and the couch multiplayer derby mode gives it shelf life beyond the solo campaign. Mac users should note the game has a compatibility warning for macOS Catalina and above.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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