➤ Without a ticket you can't leave 🎮

OMSI 2 starts badly. From the beginning it looks like a mere update of the first chapter, dating back to 2011, with various improvements and an extra city. Not bad, one would say, given that it is an accurate simulation of city buses (only from Germany) and that, therefore, between one chapter and the next it is not possible to revolutionize the game system, which it must simply aim at the most accurate reproduction possible of the activity represented.

Now, from the point of view of the simulation there is really everything: we have vehicles rebuilt down to the smallest detail that will make fans of the genre happy and we have excellent passenger management, with validation machines and stop times to be respected (yes, in the game you have to make the stops, as in reality). The software itself is also open and flexible enough to allow easy installation of mods and new scenarios and vehicles. In short, OMSI 2 basically keeps what it promises and offers a great deal of options. For example, the atmospheric control, which allows players to drive in different conditions and is completely customizable, or the choice of vehicle, with the possibility of using single or double decker buses. In all honesty, having never driven a bus in our life we have some difficulty in validating the accuracy of the simulation, but in general, from the information we have been able to glean on the network, the physics is well reproduced and the feedback of the vehicle is convincing. In this regard, the use of the steering wheel is not only supported, but also highly requested. Also consider that there are very few simulators of this kind and that usually require you to travel for long distances, especially outside urban areas, so we are faced with an almost unique title that requires an additional effort of understanding to be framed and appreciated. .

A bus simulator that just lacks the sweat of the passengers to be perfect.

He didn't have a ticket!

So let's imagine ourselves in the shoes of a bus simulator enthusiast and immediately see what's wrong with OMSI 2. As mentioned, the simulation is very accurate, so what more do you want? Well, in the meantime it will look amazing looking at the images, but the MR Software title is very heavy. On the test computer, whose configuration you find in the appropriate box, we had very frequent drops in frame rates. Indeed, let's call them collapses, not dips.

What is due to this heaviness, given that the graphics engine certainly does not do wonders on a visual level? Of course, there is all the simulation of physics that must certainly be managed, but it does not seem to us anything heavier than what we have seen in other titles. But let's pass over the dancer frame rate, which we can also tolerate (as you will imagine the gameplay is not based on alertness) and we come to the second, even bigger problem than OMSI 2: it is very buggy, to the point of being really annoying. In the first thirty minutes of testing, we went back to the desktop four times, apparently for no reason. Obviously, before reporting it in the review, because there is always the risk that it depends on our computer or our copy or bad luck, we did a search on the various forums to find that, indeed, bugs are very widespread and we there are several complaints about the game. We also found that installing various mods or additional content increases instability, so we carefully avoided doing this to continue testing. Among the proposed solutions, the most effective was the reduction of the audio quality, which made OMSI 2 more stable (decreasing the graphic quality did not help much). Unfortunately, the problems are not over.

Between crashes, we managed to spot another set of problems. First of all, polygonal interpenetration is very frequent: passengers in the middle of bus doors, flying pedestrians, others passing through parts of the scenery as if they were ghosts, atmospheric effects that create terrifying graphic artifacts, walls that appear and disappear, dogs and cats that put photos on Instagram and other biblical plagues alternate on the screen in rapid succession, to the point of making us suspect that they are features and not glitches.

We season it all with an artificial intelligence of the bus driven by the CPU that makes water from all sides to definitively close the case. Yet we are particularly sorry to have to mistreat OMSI 2, because behind the austere skin and behind the atrocious realization, there are some excellent elements that it is a shame to see overshadowed. For example, the buses are very painstakingly rebuilt, with the new MAN NG272 and the various MAN NL202 models taking center stage. The city, Spandau, is also beautifully shaped and is a pleasure to visit. Particularly interesting is the possibility of shooting it in the time span from 1986 to 1994, ie before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, observing some key places changed by the presence and collapse of the regime. If you want, you can also manage the changes gradually, in order to experience them more directly while playing. From the point of view of customizing the game options, OMSI 2 really offers a lot. In short, the simulator enthusiast we were talking about above will certainly be attracted to such a rich and varied offer. Too bad for the realization!

PC System Requirements

Test Setup

Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit
CPU: Intel Core i7-4770 a 3.40GHz
RAM: 16 GB
Video card: nVidia GeForce GTX 660

Minimum requirements

Operating system: Windows XP / Vista / 7/8
Processor: 2.6 GHz
RAM: 2 GB
Video Card: GeForce / AMD with 512MB minimum
DirectX: 9.0c

Recommended Requirements

Processor: Dual core with 2.8 GHz
RAM: 4 GB
Scheda video: GeForce / AMD with 1024 MB

Comment

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Readers (12)

7.5

Your vote

It is difficult to give a final rating to OMSI 2, partly because we are not big connoisseurs of simulated matter, partly because it is really plagued by gigantic technical problems and partly because we are still faced with one of those products that give the best in the long run and which are purchased by those who intend to spend months of videogame life over it. Having said that, however, some inevitable conclusions must be drawn. The first is that, at present, if you don't have patience OMSI 2 is an unstable and bug-ridden product that will annoy you on more than one occasion. Over time it will certainly be updated and fixed, but a month after publication the problems are still many. This is why we find it difficult to recommend it. Of course, it is also true that you will not find other simulators of the kind on the market and, above all, that it has its great moments that are worth trying, but we certainly cannot gloss over everything else. Let's say that, even if you are passionate, we advise you to wait for a more stable version to invest your money on it. Obviously we have not specified, because we find it superfluous, that OMSI 2 is not a title for everyone. If the idea of a bus simulator terrifies you, simply look elsewhere.