So I loaded it up and began building a small park in the small sandbox. So far so good. Then I remember I can’t build coasters for crap, so I’m gonna download some. In the meantime I load one of the saved parks the game comes with. My god. It’s glorious. You can see so many things, like stats for each individual guest, what they’ve bought, where they’ve been. You can set zones of control and assign specific workers to those zones. You have supply and demand. It’s…everything I wanted.
This game is really coming together nicely. Beta 2 started at the end of December:
Zooming was improved!
I really like that they are putting up build challenges to the community and that the winners get their submissions entered into the game as default blueprints. This way there won’t be a shortage of default rides.
So a neat thing. I’d emailed the developer’s a while ago and asked if they were making this much more management/business oriented plus more challenging vs. Planet Coaster. I mentioned they’d probably get a lot of people who like myself felt the sim part of Planet Coaster was unfulfilling and we’d be looking for something to fill that void. I said I’d buy into the beta right away if this was the case. Important however was a challenging simulation, not just fill in the blanks and win. They responded affirmatively in all aspects and said that really was their focus (outside of obviously rides and coaster building).
It allows real time building testing. You also have drop downs to see velocity and G-forces along with other stuff. You can watch the little ghost train travel the track as you build it. It has the best presentation and detail feedback I’ve experienced.
I’m pretty the reason I passed on this before is I am sick of EA, really sick of it. After playing Planet Coaster though I realize that even though i really liked RCT3, it wasn’t because of the visual upgrade so much as that plus the fact I could still tinker.
Planet Coaster is fabulous for sandbox play, like really stunning looking stuff, painters dream… but I am a tinkerer and it punishes you heavily to tinker with a roller coaster in non-sandbox park.
Thanks for the reccomendation @jpinard I played this last night, very fun!
Not to derail this much but, how complete is it right now? Should i wait or is just enough to be playable?
@MrCoffee
Seems good the campaign is not yet in but the sandbox modes feel well fleshed out. The only big negative for my setup is the performance, for such a casual looking game it sure chews up some horsepower. So its not (yet) the light casual laptop game yet I would love.
That said as I noted I am having a BLAST on my desktop machine. My daughter sat beside me and we made vomit inducing coasters :)