Fernbus Coach Simulator – Review

I’ve long been a fan of Bus Simulator, but I regularly heard from PC players how great Fernbus is, thankfully the dev’s realised people play Sim games on console too, and this week we’ve seen the release of Fernbus simulator on Xbox.

Anyone who’s played Bus Simulator will know what to expect, you jump on your trusty coach, pick up some customers then head off to your destination to drop them off. Unlike Bus Simulator’s Inter-city services, Fernbus covers a wider landscape, a much, much wider landscape with over 50,000 square Kilometre’s to explore across Europe, the southern reaches of Marseille, Nice and Toulouse in France, as far north as Hamburg and Flensburg in Germany and reaching as far west as Brest (France) and Ostava in the Czech Republic.
There’s dozens and dozens of towns and cities in between, but you can expect to see most major cities from mainland Europe in France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Czech Republic, Austira and Switzerland.

That sure sounds like a lot of driving, but the world in Fernbus works on a 1:10 scale, so that 250km drive estimated at 3 and a half hour, is the real-life equivalent of 25km, so will likely take about 25-30 minutes,
Just like the real-world, there’ll be plenty to delay your travels, with Traffic jams the most likely, especially in larger cities and at peak times, but even out in the countryside late at night, you might encounter a broken-down car that can hold things up, and you’re always going to find idiots who don’t know how to merge into traffic causing a small tailback.

The Career in Fernbus has quite an open sandbox approach compared to the stricter guidelines in Bus Sim 21, and you’re free to create any route you want.
Initially you’ll choose a home location and can plan a route anywhere within a 250km radius.
As you successfully complete routes, you’ll gain XP and level up to increase the area you can cover as well as unlocking a few extras such as express check-in for customers and the opportunity to select night hours (6pm-6am).

While the initial choice of coaches is a little light, you do open up a few more offerings, while the rest (all DLC on PC) will be released post-launch.
The good news though is while the PC version had various locations added as DLC, the console release includes all locations from previous DLC’s.
There’s also two difficulty settings in Arcade and Realistic,
Arcade starts from your first stop, and simplifies various areas including driving, light, wiper and door controls, and ensuring you get enough rest on a long journey.
Realistic turns all of that off, for anyone torn between the two, there’s also the option to customize these tweaks, but I personally I don’t feel the hoops in realistic are difficult to jump through, so I’d recommend starting with that first.

To further fine-tune your travels, you can also select the date, time and weather. This will obviously impact road conditions, visibility and traffic so you can keep it clear and sunny outside of peak hours, but with many trips taking multiple in-game hours, I like to set the time and date to real-life, and turn-on dynamic weather, which provides a much more pleasing and realistic experience without making things too difficult.

FInally, with your route set, and options in place, you’ll be on the road heading to collect your passengers, this early stage is when things really start to shine. We’re pretty used to simulation games being fairly accurate and detailed, but Fernbus succeeds in many areas similar games just don’t match up to.

Driving is enjoyable thanks to a real weight in steering, which changes dependent on speed (this can be turned off via options) but it allows control of your vehicle even if you hit an unexpected obstacle at 100kmph. There’s also a satisfying head sway that turns to see the corner as you turn the wheel, again it’s optional, but I found it really easy to judge the swing of the bus going into tight lanes.
While there’s no licensed cars, you’ll easily recognise the Honda Civic MK8, the Volvo V40 (known as the W40) and many other vehicles that look suspiciously like real-world cars we see on the streets every day.

The surrounding towns and landscapes are also incredible when you consider how much is packed into the map, Cities feel populated and look vibrant and while these locations are shrunk down to fit the game-world, you’ll still find multiple landmarks at most major cities, such as the Eiffel tower and Louvre in Paris, and various Football stadiums and Cathedrals across Europe, but these are brought to life by the realistic weather conditions and how they’re portrayed.
Those beautiful clear skies might be great, but driving towards the sun can be blinding and as impressive as the reflections are in those puddles, the accompanying rain accurately distorts your view especially in the mirrors and side-windows.

The attention to detail continues beyond the cars and weather conditions, whether it’s the Flixbus announcement you play to passengers, the opportunity to get away with speeding, and then caught for doing barely over the limit when you’re not paying attention, or the random police checks on the motorway (it’ took me 8 hours to hit my first one, which I “accidentally” drove straight past).
Customers trying to board the wrong bus, the detail of the dashboard, or police cars and number plates varying in appearance from one country to the next.

The sound is also part of the parcel, there’s no grating repetitive voice-lines from customers, but there’s enough ambience around the world that helps to make it feel alive, some sounds are a little muffled, especially that flixbus announcement, so there’s room for improvement, but as it stands it’s far from bad.

It all adds up to one of the most impressive atmosphere’s in a simulation game like this but sadly things are far from perfect and there’s sadly quite a list of issues which are going to need to be addressed by the development team before Fernbus can claim the crown as the best simulation game on Xbox.

Firstly there’s the expected issues we see on just about every game of this type, the dreaded pop-in, when vehicles and buildings pop-in to view int he distance, Bus Sim keeps this to a minimum mostly down to quite closed inner-city areas, but when out on the open road, Truck Driver and especially On The Road prove how difficult it is to prevent pop-in while still providing a realistic atmosphere.
Knowing how strong Fernbus is in this area, you might expect the worse, but the pop-in is minimal and while noticeable at times the occasional tree and car headlight isn’t the issue that falling cars were in On the Road.

Things get worse though, as you’ll see quite a few graphical glitches with texture breaks on sections of the road and signposts make them look glitched and artificial and the occasional floating sign, that moves up and down it’s post further breaks the immersion.
Also starting in Luxembourg (which I thought would be a nice central starting city) was glitched and I had to watch my coach fall into infinity, amusingly I’m sure I heard people screaming, but knowing I was also falling, it might have been my inner self.
this was the only city I noticed such a critical issue, and the developers are aware of it, but it’s another thing to add to the list of bugs that need squishing.

The major issue though, seems to be a memory-dump issue, where the longer your journey, the more data clogs up the memory and starts to cause some game-breaking issues.
Feeling brave I planned a route from France, up to the Netherlands before a long trip around various German cities, 14 stops covering over 1000km and everything was going fine until about the half-way point, approaching Dortmund, when frame-rates dropped to single figures, at times as severe as 1fps or less.

The journey in total took me almost 5 hours, with half of that battling the frame-rate, but thankfully saving, resetting and reloading the game resolved it, but it’s something the developers are going to need to fix, even if they force a re-load after a set distance.

While that’s quite a list of issues, there’s nothing that really stands out as a major long-term problem, fixing the graphical glitches, floating sign post and a few AI collision detection issues, are all things that could and should be resolved in week with a single patch.
Even the severe memory dump issue might be a relatively quick fix and while drastic, forcing a reload would be a quick-fix.
Either way, I can’t be too critical when in the digital age, nearly every game launches with a few bugs, and as many will read this review in months to come when the above launch issues have likely, long been resolved, the final score can’t be impacted too much.

Finally, it’s worth mentioning the value, at £31.99 it’s on par with the best value simulation titles, and while some will complain there’s not enough longevity that mostly resides with the lack of handholding, after the initial 10 hours and you’ve unlocked level 4 and the full map and flixbus routes.
the joy though is being able to set a route anywhere, hundreds, or thousands of kilometres across Europe and trying to maintain good time, regardless of interfering events.

About Author