Developer: Next Step Games
Publisher: Playway
Platform: Switch, Android
Tested on: Switch
Bus Fix 2019 – Review
Its time to get those hands dirty and elbows greasy. Bus Fix 2019 is developed by the people at Next Step Games and published by PlayWay. In this day and age there are more and more simulator games, simulating everything you can imagine, from surgeries to being a firefighter; even working at the airport. So naturally, it was just a matter of time until the mechanical simulators were going to be part of this ever-expanding trend as well. Will Bus Fix 2019 be able to stand among the better-received simulators or will the wheels of the bus not go round and round? It’s about time we find out.
Story
Mechanic simulators like this usually don’t have a story, at least not one with a lot of depth. Usually, it revolves around you getting to learn all the mechanics it has to offer and increase your knowledge about the engines, cars, busses, etc… that you work with. Making use of objectives that steadily increase in difficulty and offer you less and less info about how exactly the problem should be solved.
This isn’t the case for Bus Fix 2019. You get a set of general objectives that can be performed over several fixes you perform. They serve more as a form of guidance for you to just have an objective and increase your level, which then, in turn, grants you more parts as options. In theory, this doesn’t sound that bad, but it really makes you lose interest very fast. There is no incentive whatsoever to continue or put in a lot of effort.
A big part of these types of games is earning money, maintaining it, buying and selling parts and making a profit. Bus Fix does none of the above. Yes sure, you can buy a bus at the auction, fix it up and then flip it for a profit, but why? There is no point why you should do this in the first place since parts don’t cost anything here, so you never run the risk of losing any money.
Graphics
This is where it gets rough as well, the game just does not look good at all. It looks very bland, boring and the use of colors is terrible. There’s only a grand total of 6 different types of buses for you to fix and broken parts are almost entirely blacked out so there’s not really a search needed for broken parts. Everything just looks like it was cheaply executed. There aren’t any options to change the colors or the level of textures in the game either.
Sound
It’s not going to get better here either, because the soundtrack is just awful. It’s the same few beats over and over again with a small guitar riff here and there. And that’s it, no option to play other songs as you can do, for instance in Car Mechanic Simulator you can choose radio stations to find music that fits your taste or just turn the radio off. While here you can also turn the music off, it’s then done through the settings in the game. The weirdest part of the sounds this game has is that, when you completely fix the bus and the job is done, you hear the sound of a muscle car… no idea why this would be needed because clearly, that’s not at all how a bus is supposed to sound.
As for sound effects when you take off parts and repair them, even then most of them are the same. For instance, taking the wheel off, taking a window out and even taking parts off of the engine bay sound exactly the same.
Gameplay
Bus Fix 2019 has a pretty self-explanatory title, but your main objective is to fix buses and then get paid by the customer who commissioned the fix in the first place. It is a mechanical simulation game with the focus being entirely on buses. You examine the buses and fix them to the best of your ability so the customer is happy and the bus is safe again.
One of Bus Fix’s biggest strengths is also a showcase for its biggest flaw, and that are the controls. The controls with the Joy-cons really aren’t good at all, but the touchscreen controls feel great, and this is something that is severely underutilized on the switch. You can flip the bus upside down, sideways, investigate parts, turn a wrench, etc… But even this gets old fast and showcases that this is basically a mobile game that has been brought to the switch.
The gameplay itself has very little depth to it, which is surprising since games like these have the potential to offer so much depth with all the parts that are needed to make a good functioning vehicle. Yet it doesn’t realize any of this potential.
You can gain levels, which in turn unlock more buses for you to work on, as well as grant you increased tools and faster tools to complete the fix even faster. But as mentioned before, there isn’t any incentive for you to do this in the first place.
Conclusion
While this genre of games does have a considerable audience, Bus Fix just completely dropped the ball. From the lack of incentive, boring sound design, bad graphics, and cheap gameplay, it really didn’t deliver across the board. The gameplay just feels cheap with no reward for your effort. The only redeeming quality it has is that the touchscreen controls feel great, which in turn just shows that this is a poorly ported mobile game. If you are looking for a good mechanical simulator, then this one isn’t it chief.
Bus Fix 2019 - Review,
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