Our Judgment
Biggest fleet the series has ever had, real management tools, and a sunny map — all held together by traffic AI that drives like it’s never seen a road and a scoring system that punishes you for breathing wrong.
A wise warrior masters the road and a foolish warrior thinks the road will just behave. This old Sensei has driven enough of these things to know better.
They put me in Felicia Bay this time. Sunny little corner of the world that looks like someone took Spain and Portugal, shook them together, and decided that was good enough. Two cities, twenty districts, beaches, hills, long coastal stretches that actually feel like places people might live. Your job is to fix the public transport. Buy the buses. Draw the routes. Hire the drivers. Keep the schedules. Drive when you feel like it. Sit in the back as a passenger if the mood hits you. Do it alone or drag up to three friends along in cross-play.
On paper this is the biggest the series has ever been. More than forty-five licensed buses from thirteen manufacturers. Solaris finally shows up after years of people asking for it. Coach buses arrive for the first time the big touring machines like the Mercedes-Benz Tourismo that turn the longer runs into something closer to actual journeys. Unreal Engine 5 is doing the heavy lifting under the hood. The map has real size and variety. The management layer finally feels like you’re running a company instead of just pointing a bus at the next stop and hoping for the best.
There are good hours in here. Rolling a clean coach along the water at dusk with the sun in the mirrors. Watching passengers board, settle, and occasionally cause small headaches with their requests. Building a route that actually makes sense for the morning rush and then watching it run without falling apart. That quiet satisfaction of keeping time and getting people where they need to go. For the kind of player who finds peace in the rhythm of a bus line, Felicia Bay can be a comfortable place to spend an evening. Story mode eases you in with characters and contracts. Career mode lets you dig into the numbers and the network. Sandbox throws the rules out the window so you can just drive or wander on foot looking for whatever the map is hiding.
But the road fights you more than it should.
The other drivers on the street have the awareness of sleeping pigeons. They stop for no reason, drift into your lane, freeze at green lights, or otherwise act like the concept of traffic was explained to them once and then forgotten. It breaks the immersion every time it happens, and it happens often enough that you start bracing for it. The scoring and penalty systems are twitchy one soft brake, a slightly wide turn, or a passenger who decides to stand in the wrong place and the game starts docking points like you personally insulted the mayor. What should be a calm loop of driving and managing turns into a series of small frustrations that pile up.
Performance is uneven. The map looks good in still moments, but the frame rate dips when the streets get busy or when you start stacking mirrors and systems on the HUD. Some of the management tools feel like they were added late and never fully settled. The physics of the buses themselves are serviceable but never truly confidence-inspiring; the bigger coaches in particular can feel a bit floaty when you’re trying to place them precisely. In-bus events and passenger interactions add flavor, but they don’t deepen the experience enough to offset the mechanical rough edges.
The ambition is clear. The fleet is the strongest the series has put together. The map has scale and character that previous entries lacked. You can spend real time building something that feels like your own transport company. Co-op works well enough when the friends show up. For pure bus enthusiasts who just want more vehicles and more road, there is meat on the bone here.
Yet the execution keeps reminding you that this still needed more time in the garage. The systems that should fade into the background keep stepping forward to demand attention for the wrong reasons. The traffic AI and the scoring system in particular undercut the very relaxation the genre is supposed to deliver.
I drove the routes. I managed the fleet. I sat in the sunshine and watched the world go by through the windshield. I also spent too many minutes yelling at cars that should have known better and watching points drip away for mistakes that barely felt like mistakes.
A solid, content-heavy bus sim with the biggest fleet yet and real company management tools, held back by clumsy traffic AI, twitchy scoring, and a lingering unfinished feel. It earns a seat on the ladder. The ride still needs work before it deserves a deeper bow.