PLANET COASTER EARLY ACCESS SERIES

In a similar way that the SimCity reboot (and Cities: Skylines) threw away the grid based gameplay of SimCity 1-4, Planet Coaster has moved away from the grid=based gameplay of the RCT series. The main thing you’ll notice is the lack of a grid. Good job! Challenge mode is somewhere in-between the two, it gives you open land but also provides challenges to complete, like earn X amount of profit from roller coasters. Here’s all the rides, here’s all the money, here’s a massive piece of land. Career mode gives you a number of half finished parks and gives you tasks to complete, much similar to those in earlier RCT games. But that said, the game does make a number of small but important improvements. I’ve read a number of opinions that the game doesn’t advance the genre very much, it’s a difficult game to improve upon as Rollercoaster Tycoon was pretty much perfect first time. It brings back a number of features that made RCT3 such a success, whilst building upon many other features. Planet Coaster feels like a proper sequel to RCT3.

PLANET COASTER EARLY ACCESS SERIES

Seamlessly moving the series from 2D to 3D is a task that rival series, Theme Park, never managed successfully to do. While there are a few Rollercoaster Tycoon purists who will say that the original isometric games are the only way to play the franchise, in my mind Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 was the finest game in the series. Source: giantbombġ2 years ago, Frontier Developments released Rollercoaster Tycoon 3. But both Planet Coaster and RollerCoaster Tycoon World have bigger studios behind them, Frontier who are fresh off Elite Dangerous and Atari who have persuaded Nvizzo Creations to make their game, who I’d assume don’t have as much experience in the genre, which could explain the longer development cycle. That’s nothing major to be honest, both Parkitect and Theme Park Studio are being made by smaller studios, Texel Raptor and Pantera Entertainment respectively. I won’t go on about them too much as they’re all in an Early Access state (although Rollercoaster Tycoon World has suddenly been ‘released’), but it is interesting to note that Planet Coaster was the last game to be announced and the first game to be released from the bunch. I admit I may have a theme park building problem, though it gives me the ability to compare all these games. We’ve seen Theme Park Studio, Rollercoaster Tycoon World and Parkitect all enter Early Access on Steam, although the quality of these early titles leaves much to be desired (Parkitect excluded).

But in the past few years, this sub-genre of the building management game has undergone something of a renaissance. Other titles were simply terrible the 3DS’ Rollercoaster Tycoon 3D and the mobile game Rollercoaster Tycoon 4 Mobile are best left forgotten.

Thrillville (and its sequel) were well received, but not quite as open as I’d like for this type of game. Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 was released way back in 2004 and since then we’ve largely had disappointing theme park management games. There’s an old saying: you wait years for a sandbox theme park building game and four come along at once.

Planet coaster early access