Bus Driver Simulator

Bus Driver Simulator

Out of all the bus simulators on Steam, this is arguably the one with the most realistic feeling to it. Much of what you’ll be driving are old, Soviet-era tanks with no power anything that moan and groan over dips in the road. Expect lacking acceleration and the barest hint of functional brakes, which only becomes more pronounced with winter mode enabled. Turning radii are laughably bad, you’ll spend lots of time hopping curbs at first. The AI controlling other traffic is a mix of sensible and terrifying, with cars occasionally lane changing into you for no reason and the odd guy driving the wrong way. Accidents entirely caused by the AI are unusual now but they still happen, which adds a bit of a time limit factor if you hope to complete your route correctly. Passenger models are quite good with displaying individual character, just don’t be surprised to see clones when driving the larger buses. One thing you’ll not see anywhere else in a driving game are pedestrians using crosswalks and occasionally jaywalking…hard to spot sometimes and crunching them comes with a stiff penalty.

Real player with 43.7 hrs in game


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At its current state, the game is alright. Beside some stuff you may consider buying it, but it’s better to wait more and see if there will be any improvement.

Pros:

Great map, i hope the German one is as good as the Russian one.

Physics are great, you may even face sliding if you pull the handbrake or understeering if you steer way too quickly.

Graphics are great and it is good seeing that they improved a lot with the updates.

Cons:

There are some major problems that are not supposed to be in there because it is a simulator after all.

Real player with 18.9 hrs in game

Bus Driver Simulator on Steam

Mashinky

Mashinky

Do you enjoy model railroading (or have you always wanted to, but not had the space at home)?

Did you have a blast playing games like Sim City 4?

Do you enjoy watching beautiful trains rolling through pretty scenery?

If these describe you then odds are good you will like Mashinky.

Mashinky allows you to plan & build railroads on its grid-based map. You start the game in the early steam age with the choice of locomotives that were barely able to pull much more than themselves down the track, & progress through various other ages unlocking new industries for your rail empire to serve & new, more powerful locomotives to serve them with. As of Dec 2018 there are 4 eras to play through (2 different steam eras, & 2 diesel eras). Each era (at present) unlocks 3 or 4 locomotives to choose between (once reaching the 4th era many of the old steamers are retired from production & no longer able to be purchased beyond what stock you already own, but this does seem fairly logical) & several new industries. In the year+ that I’ve owned this game, the developer has been steadily adding features (steadily, but not rapidly -they have added eras 2 and 3 within about a 1.5 year span so understand that their planned 7 eras once the game is finished will take a while). Despite that, Mashinky is extremely enjoyable as it is already (so long as you are not playing it solely to unlock a futuristic bullet train that does not exist in game yet) & despite being an early access title I would highly recommend.

Real player with 587.9 hrs in game


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[EDITED 11/8 to correct several misunderstandings, errors, and things which were changed.]

TL;DR: There’s a lot of things this game does right, but at present there are simply better options in the train sim world. I give it a thumbs up because I feel this game has real heart, a strong attention to detail and realism, and great potential, but be careful before you buy it in its present state. I won’t lie and say I didn’t have fun with it, I did, but it gets stale pretty quick at present, and simply adding more eras through which to progress (as the developer seems intent on doing) won’t address the reasons it becomes stale - not in any way.

Real player with 346.3 hrs in game

Mashinky on Steam

Frontier Pilot Simulator

Frontier Pilot Simulator

I can’t. I want to but, I just can’t endorse this. This is sci-fi jet plane trucker simulator and it looks cool and I love the idea, but the execution is lacking. This isn’t some honorably realistic aero simulator so don’t expect that from it. Actually, don’t expect anything at all from it other than a challenge and cost effective entertainment.

This is a Unity game with Unity problems. Sometimes the game will hitch when other aircraft fly by or it updates the weather. Early it just completely flips out. Depending on your situation, you either have to re-trim or it kicks and spins out the bottom of your aircraft in a unnatural way. Having played KSP for thousands of hours and using planes in that game: I can see the frayed edges left by Unity in this one. What has been built so far is an accomplishment, but it will forever be held back by this. It needs to look better than it does, play better than it does, consume fewer system resources than it does, and hold fewer frustrations to compete with other games or even other sims. It has performance issues that might prevent them from ever implementing VR or increasing world detail.

Real player with 51.2 hrs in game


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I absolutely love this game and fully recommend it to people who know what early access is and are willing to look past some bugs/systems that haven’t yet been added.

Pros:

-Stable. (I’ve only encountered one crash in this game and it only happened because of a series of unique incidents that I caused.)

-Easy to learn flight mechanics that are still challenging at times and will punish you if you ever get too cocky.

-Weather events that will break the monotony of flying straight and force you to change the style of your flight. (In some situations, you’d be best just to land and let the weather pass by itself since most events force you to fly low and low altitude, clouds and mountain ranges just don’t mix.)

Real player with 46.8 hrs in game

Frontier Pilot Simulator on Steam

Simutrans

Simutrans

So i made a 120km/h road for my goods truck and somehow some city car think “We should try this fast lane, mate! LOL YOLO” even though their fricking car can’t go faster than 50km/h. I’m worried that this will slowdown my shipment. I try everything to stop this motherf###er so they can’t enter my fast lane. But it’s not working. They even go full “F##k the police” and proceed to get past my 100km/h road mark. I feel hopeless…

But then i see something in the corner of my game window. There is my 120km/h truck. In front of him there is these a####le city car. He is slowing down just as i thought. But in the next second, everything change…

Real player with 257.1 hrs in game

–-{Graphics}—

☐ You forget what reality is

☐ Beautiful

☐ Good

☐ Decent

☐ Bad

☐ Don‘t look too long at it

☑ Paint.exe

—{Gameplay}—

☑ Very good

☐ Good

☐ It‘s just gameplay

☐ Mehh

☐ Starring at walls is better

☐ Just don‘t

—{Audio}—

☐ Eargasm

☐ Very good

☐ Good

☑ Not too bad

☐ Bad

☐ Earrape

—{Audience}—

☐ Kids

☐ Teens

☐ Adults

☑ Human

☐ Lizards

—{PC Requirements}—

☑ Check if you can run paint

☐ Potato

☐ Decent

☐ Fast

☐ Rich boiiiiii

☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

—{Difficulity}—

Real player with 97.5 hrs in game

Simutrans on Steam

Bloody Rally Show

Bloody Rally Show

200 character summary

Bloody Rally Show is an absolutely unfair rogue like top down racing game with very nice controls and 4 player split screen, earn money, Kill peds for nitro, use weapons to kill, Anything for the win.

Story & Characters 9/10

You wake up in 2084 as a custom protagonist You had an accident in 2021 and where put into a cryosleep, to pay it back you have to compete in the most popular form of entertaintment these days. It is a dystopian future and the global economy has been taken over in the year 2030 by that big tech company you should know about. When they focussed on Entertainment and noticed Rally was very popular in the 80s because of the high accident rate so surely enough Bloody Rally Show was born. It is very popular so social media influencers are always on top of the action to get those likes, no matter how dangerous it is.

Real player with 140.0 hrs in game

Let’s backtrack a little bit, one year or so later, when I was bored out of my mind for games. I am a fan of top-down racers, things like the original Death Rally and others, and I saw this game. It looked really rough with sort of 3d car models in a 2d environment, but the game had something that stuck by me. Generated roads and a hint of rogue-lite. So, I was interested and unexpectedly, I was received a key, in return for something - FEEDBACK. So, I did my best I could. Let’s fast forward to where we are.

Real player with 122.7 hrs in game

Bloody Rally Show on Steam

Eggcelerate!

Eggcelerate!

Tim Beaudet’s, Eggcelerate!, brings a spin on racing games, where your objective is to finish the level without dropping your egg. A novel twist on the classic egg and spoon races, that as kids we are too familiar with, with just as much frustration.

From the sound effects to the music, it is a quirky and fun little game, that will certainly test your patience.

It didn’t take me long to realize that this game is impossible to play with a keyboard, so word of advice, unless you have nimble fingers and a keyboard that allows for great reaction times, then do yourself a favour and grab a controller, and have some fun.

Real player with 50.2 hrs in game

Eggcelerate! is a game where you can sink your teeth, playing hours on end trying to beat the developer’s time.

Opposed to other games, the times set by the developer are very challenging!

If that wasn’t enough, you can try and compete on speedrun.com/eggcelerate !

Even if you’re not that of a hardcore gamer, this game is still a great content.

The many puns, silly sounds and overall aesthetic that cracks you up every time you play.

A solid game to try if you have a couple of hours to spare.

Real player with 47.5 hrs in game

Eggcelerate! on Steam

Train Valley 2

Train Valley 2

I loved Train Valley and although I initially preferred it as I play more of TV2 I realise this game is a bit better. It’s addictive laying tracks and trying to get the correct trains to the correct stations, upgrading them so they carry another carriage and go that bit quicker, and buying more trains so I can shift goods and people more efficiently. It’s easy to stuff up a single track route to have trains crash or go into the wrong station - but that is all part of the fun and puzzle aspect of the game. Striving to get 5 stars on each challenge is also always achievable (in my plays anyway) but might take you a few goes, which means a little bit of replayability for each map.

Real player with 593.3 hrs in game

Create goods via different stations that rely on each other! Good gameplay, supported by a friendly community.

Solve the puzzle!

Every level is a puzzle: several towns require goods in order to finish the level. Those towns produce workers, which are required in most crafting stations. For instance, if the town needs glass, you first send workers to a sand excavation station. There workers are converted into sand over time. The sand then is transported to the glass factory, along with a new supply of workers. Finally the glass is transported to the town. The ratio is always 1:1. So before you start the level you can calculate how many workers need to go where.

Real player with 299.0 hrs in game

Train Valley 2 on Steam

Mini Metro

Mini Metro

Positives:

Though still in need of some refinement and balancing—and possibly some additional features—the core gameplay of Mini Metro scratches that city-building itch without requiring a major investment of time. You can play this on a break without worrying you’ll be sucked in for hours (though you won’t get bored if you did waste a day on it).

The interface is a case study in complex, context-sensitive functionality from simple interactions. Click, hover, drag and drag paths all combine to do just what you want without requiring a tutorial. Though you might spend your first game puzzling it out, it all just works how you’d expect on the first or second try. Pure, blissful affordance. If only more games thought out their interface so elegantly.

Real player with 138.5 hrs in game

Mini Metro, currently available in Early Access (the game can be purchased but is still in development so some elements, such as sound in this case, are missing or unfinished), is a game about moving people. Where this may seem like an oversimplification, it is not, and the game is all the better for it. Other games of this sort focus on such elements as budget and specific regions, population density and specific destinations of interest to that population; but Mini Metro instead focuses on the general and the deliberately vague; and this works fantastically given the style of the game. There is no budget with which to be concerned, there are no apparent city divisions or districts. The placement of stations is random, and also out of the control of the player. In many ways, this almost makes the goal more true to life of a real world occupation, albeit without feeling like work: somebody is presenting the player with a scenario, and the goal is to make it work by connecting the stations, and keeping people moving.

Real player with 38.0 hrs in game

Mini Metro on Steam

Conduct DELUXE!

Conduct DELUXE!

You’ve seen this kind of game before. The frantic adjust-the-train-switches-so-trains-don’t-collide game, BUT… This is a really good one. I don’t know what about it makes it so enjoyable. Maybe it’s how varied nad interesting looking the tracks are.

Bridges, tunnels that make trains reappear somewhere else, as well as many varying enciromenments.

This, along with the ability to select your own trains, as well as having you actually expected to transport passengers from place to place (Which also means, if your train is yellow, and heading towards a yellow station, any yellow passengers form stations it passes along the way will also board it) all work together to make this the best game of it’s kind that I’ve played so far. (Granted I haven’t played many, but I still feel like this is one of the better ones)

Real player with 39.4 hrs in game

The best way I can describe this game is: it’s like juggling three coloured balls where they change colour mid air and in which two more balls and a chainsaw are thrown at you during the course of your act.

The levels themselves are mostly fair and well designed (I’ll come back to that in a minute) and the controls are lenient enough to where when you fail you can only blame yourself.

The music is a nice complement to the gameplay and the art style is nice and simplistic.

Another nice feature is that you can choose which levels to unlock first which has the bonus effect of being able to leave a difficult level for another which makes the game a lot less frustrating when you meet a level that you just can’t quite complete.

Real player with 37.8 hrs in game

Conduct DELUXE! on Steam

Rail Route

Rail Route

Pros:

  • Hours upon hours of tycoon gameplay

  • Diverse challenges in a scored timetable mode

  • Editor that allows you to build your masterpiece

  • Nice community members

  • Tons of community-made maps, including most of the ones in the game*

  • Community input often considered and sometimes helps remake parts of the game

  • Workshop support for easy sharing

  • Endless/Tycoon mode replayability - Not for everyone, but I’ve played Prague 21 different times by now in the alpha version of the game.

Real player with 1277.9 hrs in game

Rail Route is a mix between a railway management game, a train dispatcher game and a puzzle game. You task is to make trains ride , keeping a timetable and make some virtual money so you can invest in more track.

Depending on how you play, it can be very hectic or a very relaxed game. Extending tracks can be hard, because, like in real life, there are restriction. You cannot just put your track where you like. When you gain money and experience points, you can “buy” game upgrades, starting simple like an function to reverse a train direction automatically to high speed tracks, tunnels and so on.

Real player with 170.6 hrs in game

Rail Route on Steam