After a few years in Early Access, niche sim-management game City Bus Manager has released its full 1.0 version, adding a ton of new scenarios and a big increase in scale to its simulation of running a bus company pretty much anywhere in the world. Buying buses, hiring staff, and upgrading your HQ are one half of the gameplay—the other half is all about setting up routes on maps that reflect real-world road layouts.
The coolest part of that is how you can pick pretty much anywhere in the world to set up your bus company. Famous cities are definitely on the menu, but so are smaller towns or even sprawling multi-city metroplexes like the corridor between Northern Virginia and Baltimore. The 1.0 release also expands the limit on map sizes tenfold, and removes the limit on the number of bus lines you can run. With that 250-line cap gone, you can simulate all 300-something New York City bus lines.
The trick behind that tech is that City Bus Manager uses data from OpenStreetMap to set up its worldwide network of roads. OpenStreetMap, if you're not familiar, is basically a Wikipedia-style community project for geographical data and world maps.
The full release comes with highly customizable sandbox scenario-building on top of the standard game, letting you tweak the difficulty of your bus-managing with settings like passenger volume, customer service needs, dirt, breakdowns, employee and passenger finickiness—just about whatever you'd like. It also integrates more in-game statistics for understanding your ridership and lets you hire ticket inspectors to hunt down fare skippers if you're a total narc.
City Bus Manager launches with a DLC already out that adds electric buses and green energy initiatives to your suite of upgrade options. The DLC comes with technology and policies to research and setup in your HQ that are mostly based around getting to net-zero emissions, beautifying the city, and utilizing alternative energy to charge up your electric fleet.
You can find City Bus Manager on Steam for $30, with a 30% off deal that shaves off ten bucks until July 11.
