PLANET COASTER: A Glorious Return to Form for the Tycoon Genre!
(Originally posted Aug 21, 2017)
Rollercoaster Tycoon was a game that became victim to it's own success. It's latest incarnation, Rollercoaster Tycoon World was set to be released on mobile devices and was doomed to fail. It left us wondering why don’t companies make reboots of old games actually worth playing?
Well, wonder no longer! Literally a day after the Rollercoaster Tycoon World flopped, Planet Coaster was released to the world and it's amazing. It's not perfect, but it gives fans of the long dwindling tycoon genre what they want. It's a game free of pointless timers and ingamepurchases that create artificial walls to progress. Instead, it comes with impressively in depth tools to create geography and some really epic roller coasters.
Frontier Developments are probably most known right now for the space sim, Elite: Dangerous. Moving to a game about roller coasters may seem like an odd turn. However, for the studio it's more an opportunity to breathe life back into a genre they helped define, similar to what they did with Elite. They are the studio responsible for Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 and 3 and that experience is evident in the game play. This is more than just a spiritual successor, but the genuine sequel to Rollercoaster Tycoon despite the difference in branding.
Like most tycoons, the game play focuses on managing your bank balance. Stay in the positive and you’ll be able to build an increasingly larger park. Dip into the negative and you may have to make some radical changes before things get too bad. It’s always been the problem of these kinds of games that once things start to go south it can be pretty difficult to head back into the positive. However, Planet Coaster does manage to give you easy access to managing where money is being spent in your park which mitigates some of that difficulty. In one park, I realized some rather expensive rides were simply not making money. Shutting down the rides got rid of their monthly cost which gave me time to save up money and figure out a solution. At its most basic, that is the game and it work really well. It's rewarding to fix an unsuccessful aspect of your park.
With this level of ease in managing your budget, you will find the challenge comes from pushing the envelope and maximizing the effectiveness of each aspect of your park. While overall you may be doing well, there might be a specific kiosk that simply can not make a profit and is continually closing down. The game allows you micro manage that kiosk all the way down to the cost of specific items and, for example, how much mustard or ketchup is included on the hotdog it may sell. Even your individual employees have separate needs and desires for pay and training. I can not think of another sim with that level of detail. While it's gives some really fun options to toy with, it did start to feel a bit tedious. That level of management can be ignored if a player opts for a more top down approach. Following this play style, I found that after a few hours my bank balance started to feel irrelevant and that if I was going to challenge myself I needed to make increasingly stupid decisions just to create a problem to work my way out of.
The game is also missing a bit of unpredictability. There is a constant flow of guests and money and no outside factors change your attendance. The game would greatly benefit from meaningful and impactful random events to add some wrinkles into the management aspect of the game. At the moment, the only challenge is rides breaking down with an increasing cost and frequency needed to repair them. This was incredibly annoying, tedious, and honestly felt like a bit of a cheap mechanic. I would rather have had the game prompt me to make meaningful choices to keep the park afloat rather than the game just ask for more money as time moves forward.
Your park’s guests are as lovable as ever. Their faces emoting fear and excitement, boredom and hunger. They are your lemmings, ready to be guided down lit paths of food stalls and rides all waiting for suck up their money. The game allows you to invest in advertisements. This gives you some control over what kinds of people attend your park. This in turn affects what kind of rides you will want to build, which is a nice bit of synergy between two separate game-play mechanics. The guests act surprisingly natural and it's pretty fun to watch them navigate your park. The only complaint I have about them is there seems to be a bit of a discrepancy between time in the game and how your guests experience it. A single person may stay for months which dramatically changes how you have to play. If you want free rides with a single entrance fee to the whole park, you’ll find your profits dry up pretty quickly as no one leaves to make room for new incoming guests. This creates a unique challenge for players, but feels unbalanced and a bit too obvious of a concession to game-play over the simulation.
Roller coaster creation far exceeds my expectations. Again, the amount of minute details you can affect is incredible. Everything from the incline of the tracks to the intensity of the brakes. It all goes into creating the perfect roller coaster. At first, this multitude of options may seem like a bit of overkill, but once you begin delving into how guests react to your coasters each decision begins to feel important. Creating a coaster that balances fear, nausea, and excitement is not as easy as it seems.
How you decorate your park is also important. Spending money on making your park look good with props and buildings makes people happier and want to spend more money. It also can make your roller coasters more fun for guests. This is actually a really cool and smart idea. The amount of money a real life park spends on decorations can mean the difference between Disneyland and a tourist trap. So it's nice to see this reflected in the simulation. That being said, this mechanic is pretty easy to exploit from what I experienced. It requires little more than putting as many props around a ride and it's queue as possible with little thought for actual placement. While one could say this type of mechanic is requires a player to make the most of it for themselves, it would be nice if the game had a way of rewarding me for trying hard as opposed to spamming random props everywhere.
Overall the simulation really shines when you focus on making your guests happy as opposed to making money. Their feeling and emotions seem to accurately reflect the decisions you make in your park. Make a ride too scary? Don’t be surprised if no takes a ride on it. Your park is dirty and uncomfortable, people may not stay very long. Put a ride too far out of the way, the walk may stop people from going that far. This creates a push and pull between you and the simulation, one that asks you discover what makes the best park. Again, I’d say the game's biggest flaw is that it needs something to break up the game play and add a few wrinkles to your plans. I don’t doubt that this will be brought into the mix with patches and DLC, and we may even see something from the mod scene which Frontier Developments have been quick to support.
At the end of the day, it's just plain fun to create a new park from the ground up. Building new roller coasters is much more enjoyable than I expected and the game allows and encourages you experiment with how much money you can get out of your guests. Hopefully, this is a sign to other companies that tycoon games profitable on the PC if their made correctly. I would love a new Zoo Tycoon!
