So I’ve been racking up a lot of hours in this game and it’s been great. I remember playing the old Rollercoaster Tycoon games and I inevitably burned out on them after only a short while. With this one I actually managed to complete all of the scenarios in career mode though I did cheat by downloading blueprints for coasters and buildings on the Steam Workshop to make things easier. I also bought one of the many DLCs available, specifically the Magnificent Rides Collection, and though I didn’t realize it at first, it actually makes the scenarios much easier as well.

As is obvious the point here is to build and manage your own theme park. This means putting down rides, laying down paths and also putting in shops, toilets, lighting, scenery and much more. In addition to the eponymous coasters, rides encompass flat rides, simple self-contained rides such as the familiar carousel, as well as tracked rides which involve vehicles moving relatively slowly along a predefined track. Creating tracks for both coasters and tracked rides can be rather involved and time consuming as you integrate various pieces and give them surrounding scenery. You can even control triggers for animatronics and special effects like lights, sound and fireworks. Plus of course you have options to research new rides, to pay for marketing campaigns to pull in more visitors and to manage your employees. There is a ton of stuff to learn.

The game is incredibly beautiful despite the impressive size of the parks you can build and the sheer amount of stuff that you can put into that space. There’s a building editor included that allows you put up all kinds of structures you can imagine as well plenty of scenery and decoration pieces. I’m not really the creative type so I barely touched the surface of what’s possible but you only have to look into the Steam Workshop all of the incredible stuff people have come up with. There’s a full day-night cycle as well, fantastic looking water effects, properly glowing lights, reflections etc. It just looks amazing. One downside is that I had intermittent graphical issues with planes of black appearing on the screen. It only sporadically appeared on some maps and not others and getting rid of them required restarting the game entirely. I never could figure out what caused them or how to make the problem go away for good. Still they only popped up rarely so it’s not a serious impediment to playing.

The career mode takes you through no less than 21 scenarios which is why playing through them all is so time consuming. While it seems repetitive to make parks over and over again, in practise it’s quite engrossing as through a combination of different topologies and scenario objectives, the designers manage to make each scenario quite unique. One map for example involves trying to fit your rides in a canyon-strewn area with very little flat terrain. Many maps feature extensive preplaced buildings and scenery that you can’t alter and must therefore work around. One memorable map starts out with the park in an awful state with litter all over the place and being full of angry customers. Another map is effectively cut off into four quadrants with only a monorail line connecting them. Then there’s the sheer pleasure of seeing the many beautiful parks that the developers have built. One of my favorite ones is Gulpee’s Island Paradise set on its own island and is apparently part of a later update. These beautiful parks give you an incentive take more effort to develop them in a way that matches the existing esthetics and not simply rush to complete the objectives as quickly as possible.

One downside is that while it’s amazing as a creative tool, its game mechanics can make it feel very, well, gamey once you understand them well. For example, adding scenery adds prestige to rides roughly in proportion to how much the scenery costs. Naturally the algorithm can’t judge the esthetics so place whatever you want and wherever you want so long as it’s in range. That’s fine. But some maps greatly restrict the area available around the rides. You can get around that by simply having scenery pieces float around the ride or buried underneath it. The game mechanics don’t care but it looks awful. Another oddity is that you can tweak the settings of flat rides to change their movement patterns and make a ride longer. That’s a great option but doing so sometimes allows the ride to gain a truly ridiculous amount of prestige. It’s sad when you have a five star flat ride that costs maybe only $2,000 which everyone flocks towards while a four star roller coaster that cost $20,000 sits empty.

Another issue I have is that while building huge parks is fun, watching visitors move around in them is less so when the parks are big. The number of total visitors is determined by the park’s overall rating and it seems that new visitors arrive when old ones leave. In addition, visitors have a limited amount of money on them. Unfortunately the visitors are also very dumb. Even when they have very little money left they tend to walk towards rides and shops only to be rebuffed. It takes some time before they give up entirely and decide to go home. You can install ATMs so they can get more cash but only a small proportion of visitors ever use them. This means that in very large parks, you can have thousands of visitors and very few of them actually have money as they can spend them very quickly. The rides towards the back of the park far from the entrance will hardly ever be used even if they have a high prestige rating because by the time the visitors get to them, they will have all run out of money.

Finally even with all the time I put into this, there are still features that I’ve barely touched. For example restaurants and hotels are implemented, though in a very simple way, but they don’t appear in any of the career mode scenarios at all so I haven’t played with them. There are so many coaster types that I can’t even remember the differences between them. Designing a proper coaster with good ratings, its own personalized theme-appropriate station, scenery, triggers etc. is such a complex endeavor that it might take days just to do it all right. Then there are all the terrain shaping tools. The premade parks often make great use of tunneling to create incredible coasters and tracked rides while the best I could usually do was create shortcuts for pedestrians.

I spent a lot of time on this and had lots of fun. But that’s mostly due to how beautiful it is and how much scope it gives you for creating all kinds of things. The game mechanics are kind of iffy and you figure out ways to get around them quickly enough. But as a creative experience this is absolutely wonderful and I really appreciated how each of the ride is fully developed down to the smallest details. This is really apparent when you drop down to the ride camera. In fact though I’m far too old now to really enjoy theme parks, playing this inspired me enough to check out lots of videos of various ride experiences on YouTube. It’s pretty cool what they can do with modern technology these days.