Bus Simulator 27

Introduction

Bus Simulator 27, released 8 September 2026 by Simteract and published by astragon Entertainment, continues the long-running annual Bus Simulator franchise: drive buses across a large city, building routes, managing passengers, and growing a transit company from the ground up. It sits Mixed with a substantial sample of 212 reviews, and reading widely through it reveals a specific, frustrating pattern this review found across nearly every detailed account — genuine, real improvements consistently undermined by severe, widely reported technical failures at the core of the driving experience itself.

Real, specific improvements over the previous entry

The praise in this sample is concrete and specific, not vague nostalgia. Reviewers on both sides of the overall recommend line credit the city map as a meaningful step up from the immediately preceding mainline entry, describing a more believable road layout, greater district variety, and considerably more environmental detail. Bus audio draws its own specific praise, with reviewers highlighting unique door and engine sounds per vehicle as a genuine realism improvement over the prior game's more generic sound design. Customisation and presentation systems draw further appreciation, including dynamic weather with varying rain intensity, climate control requirements, and detailed end-of-trip performance reviews that several reviewers say add real texture to the core driving loop.

Severely broken traffic AI at the centre of this sample's criticism

Set directly against those improvements, this review found a large, consistent body of criticism focused on one specific system: AI traffic behaviour. Reviewers repeatedly describe vehicles disappearing and reappearing without warning, becoming stuck motionless in the middle of the road, or in some documented cases behaving as though they've abandoned physics entirely. This isn't a minor immersion complaint — multiple reviewers describe it actively disrupting nearly every driving session, turning routine routes into unpredictable obstacle courses regardless of how carefully the player drives.

An unfair penalty system compounding the traffic problems

Layered directly on top of the traffic AI issues, this review found specific, detailed complaints about the game's citation and penalty system. Multiple reviewers report receiving fines and rule violations even when their bus was struck by an out-of-control NPC vehicle through no fault of the player's own driving, describing the combination of broken traffic AI and an unforgiving penalty system as a "bad time" that actively punishes players for problems the game itself created.

A specific, pointed Advance Access controversy

One further complaint recurs with unusual specificity across this sample. Multiple buyers of a paid Advance Access edition describe it, in effect, as funding a beta test — the same fundamental bugs present during that early access period, according to these reviewers, remained largely unresolved once the game moved to full release and full price. This review reports this as a specific, repeated grievance rather than a single frustrated buyer's complaint, given how consistently multiple independent reviewers frame their experience in nearly identical terms.

A recurring pattern across the developer's prior titles

Beyond this specific release, several reviewers place the traffic AI problems in a broader context, specifically naming Taxi Life, an earlier release from the same development studio, as carrying the identical underlying complaint without resolution. This review reports this comparison as reviewers' stated observation rather than independently verified fact, but the specificity and repetition of the comparison across multiple reviewers suggests a pattern worth taking seriously when weighing how likely these particular issues are to be resolved through future patches.

Performance issues and missing expected features

Beyond the AI and penalty complaints, this review found further concrete technical issues. Multiple reviewers report crashes and stuttering, with at least one detailed account describing a full system crash during play. Separately, reviewers report missing features some considered standard for the genre, including proper camera or glancing-direction controls that both prior entries and genre peers typically include, alongside reported optimisation regressions compared to earlier games in the same series.

A minority who push back against the harshest criticism

It's worth reporting directly that not every reviewer accepts the severity of the negative consensus. At least one detailed reviewer explicitly pushes back on what they describe as overly dramatic criticism, arguing the game "has a lot to offer in terms of driving, exploration and room for expansion" and suggesting some of the harshest reviews reflect unrealistic expectations rather than a genuinely broken product. Separate reviewers report smooth performance and solid frame rates even on modest hardware, describing frame rates in the high 20s to low 30s on a budget laptop GPU without significant drops, and specifically praising upscaling technology for maintaining visual quality at that performance level. This review reports these accounts as genuinely held positions within the same sample raising the harshest complaints documented above, rather than treating the negative consensus as absolute or unanimous — hardware configuration and individual tolerance for AI jank both appear to meaningfully affect how severely a given player experiences this release.

Judging an annual franchise against its own release cadence

It's worth placing this specific entry's problems within the context of the series' established yearly release cycle, since several reviewers explicitly do so themselves. Multiple longtime fans who've played the series since much earlier entries frame their disappointment specifically in terms of expected progress: after multiple years and multiple full-priced releases, they expected fundamental systems like traffic AI to have matured rather than seemingly regressed. That framing matters for understanding why this release generates such pointed frustration compared to a brand-new IP shipping with comparable bugs — buyers aren't judging Bus Simulator 27 in isolation, they're judging it against a specific, reasonable expectation of incremental improvement that an annual franchise implicitly promises with each new full-priced entry, and a meaningful share of this sample reports that promise going unmet yet again.

Final Verdict

Bus Simulator 27 delivers real, specific improvements over its immediate predecessor — a larger, more detailed map, better bus audio, and deeper customisation systems that reviewers across this entire sample consistently credit. What holds this score down is a severe, widely corroborated pattern of AI traffic failures and an unfair penalty system that together undermine the core driving experience the series depends on, compounded by a specific, pointed controversy over a paid Advance Access tier that many buyers say delivered a beta test rather than early access to a finished product. Wait for significant patches before buying at full price; longtime fans specifically drawn to the presentation improvements may find real value here once the fundamental traffic issues documented across this sample are actually resolved.