Like many other enthusiasts out there, I love to play computer games! In particularly theme park simulators of which there have been many great (and not so great ones) over the years, including the Rollercoaster Tycoon series, Parkitect and the Thrillville series. At the time of writing this though, I think the best one on the market is Planet Coaster!
Frontier Developments & History
Frontier is a game developer based in Cambridge, UK and has helped to shape a lot of the theme park business simulation space. They’ve had a hand in the Rollercoaster Tycoon series, the Thrillville series, Jurassic World Evolution series, as well as Zoo Tycoon (2013) and Planet Zoo.
After the release of Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, everything was well. The company had a string of decent games, and had now worked on a staple title in theme park management genre. Things began to sour though as it was found that the games publisher, Atari had been underpaying Frontier for sales of the games, amounting to $2.2 Million (£1.6 million). This led to a lot of legal issues and backlash, even leading to the game being pulled from sale from the Steam store.
Though no official settlement ever came from this, Frontier did eventually relist Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 on Steam, now as a Complete Edition. This came bundled with the Wild! and Soaked! expansions much like the Platinum and Deluxe editions prior, but with ‘enhancements’.
As for Planet Coaster? Development started sometime before January 2015 when the game was first announced, and it was released on the 17th of November 2016. It serves as a spiritual successor to the Rollercoaster Tycoon Franchise, with Frontier stating that the ‘Tycoon’ name “doesn’t carry the cachet anymore”. I wholeheartedly agree with this statement as Rollercoaster Tycoon 3, and its expansions, were the last great Rollercoaster Tycoon games, after that, Atari seemed content with butchering the name and slapping it all over cheaply made mobile games riddled with microtransactions.
Atari did actually do 1 great thing with the name after Frontier left and that was to rerelease Rollercoaster Tycoon 1 and 2 under Rollercoaster Tycoon Classic, which is an excellent way to play these older games on modern PCs and tablets, so kudos to them! I’ll have to go through the Rollercoaster Tycoon Franchise in another blog sometime as it’s such a sad story!
Planet Coaster
As mentioned before, Planet Coaster follows on from Rollercoaster Tycoon 3, and you can certainly see it in many ways, from the look of the guests, to the menus and ride selection. A lot of the staple rides are here, such as the Enterprise, Top Spin, Drop Towers, Chair Swings and of course rollercoasters! A lot of these are named differently to their real world counterparts, such as the Enterprise being called the Collider, and the Screamin’ Swing being called a Hammer Swing.
At time of writing there are over 200 flat rides, rollercoasters, tracked rides and shops to build and customise, as well as a plethora of scenery and building construction items to fully realise your theme park desires!
A few of these are part of extra downloadable content that is priced anywhere from £1.99 – £12.99 on Steam, with the most expensive and most recent being a tie in with Ghostbusters. These are regularly on sale so you can pick them up for bargain prices with a little patience!
It’s not without its issues…
The game plays very well and is a joy to control, but does have a couple of issues that I’d love to see rectified in a sequel.
The first big issue I have with the game is the performance in larger parks. When you’ve got 2000+ guests in parks with hundreds of scenery pieces and rides, the game can really struggle with everything going on. I think part of this stems from each guest having individual AI and being somewhat aware of other guests as they try to avoid each other and not just walk through one another.
The other is the path building system in the game. It can feel quite limiting as there isn’t a way to fill in sections of ground as path without it being part of a square block. You can use the games path system to almost fill in entire areas but it can be very picky and a pain to work with!
You’ll start by building a block of path then move onto freeform path building to make a curved end. Now that small triangle can’t be filled in and needs additional work to cover up, or path rethinking. (see below)
Improvements to the game
Besides the issues mentioned above, I’d love to see transfer tracks built into the game from the start. You can mimic the look of transfer tracks, but not the functionality at present!
I’d also like to see much more customisation for rollercoaster trains. For example different fonts and placement of the ride name, different colours for the 0 car and such, and maybe a system that could allow for completely unique trains, using the in game engine! Maybe something like Need for Speed Carbon had for its car customisation. Parts of the ride vehicle can be selected and pulled, or pushed to make them bigger or small, curved or straight, and so on!
Next on my wish list is certainly more fonts. At present there are 8 different fonts available, many of which don’t look that great when used on signs as they look unfinished. I’d love to be able to import custom fonts but there isn’t the functionality for that here unfortunately.
Having finally gotten around to trying No Limits 2 and trying out their Ride Controls board, I’d really like to see that incorporated into Planet Coaster in someway. It’s great fun dispatching trains and running through the rigmarole of preparing a rollercoaster for operations! Perhaps a full ride operator mode in future?
Another minor thing I’d like to be able to do is rotate buildings around the X and Y axis to allow buildings to be tilted or placed at a slant. It would also help when building large structures too as you’d be able to copy other parts and rotate as needed.
All in, there is a great game here, and the hundreds of hours I’ve played for most certainly backs this up, but I would love to see, or even just hear of a sequel, especially if it adds some of the things I’d love to see!
Planet Coaster © 2021 Frontier Developments plc. All rights reserved.
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