Planet Coaster is an amusement park construction and management simulation game, where you build your own roller coasters, manage staff, and decorate surroundings to gain maximum profit.
The base idea is to create rides to attract customers to your park. Customers buy tickets to the rides of your park to ride them. Customers also have needs to other things than just enjoyment. There are different food-, drink-, balloon-, and gift stalls to keep your customers happy. These stalls and rides don’t work by themselves, so they need vendors to keep them open. In addition to vendors, your park needs some other workers too to keep your park good-looking and safe: janitors to clean the park, security guards to stop thieves, mechanics to repair rides, and entertainers to entertain customers. While managing your workers and rides, you can also manage research to come up with new rides and decorations. When you’ve collected enough money from your rides, you can expand your park more by buying more rides and staff. Be careful with your money, because all rides age and some workers might quit, which may make your income turn around.
The different game modes have a little change on your gameplay. Career mode has prebuilt parks to manage and tasks to complete. Challenge and sandbox mode start from a flat empty park, but challenge mode has limited money to spend and tasks to complete, while in the sandbox mode you can build as much as you want without any limits. The career mode was the most fun to me: the prebuilt parks look nice when starting the game, and career tasks were challenging to complete. The only complaint about career mode is that it felt like there were too few of them. Challenge mode was also very interesting since there you have a lot of space to build what you want, but you also have limited starting money and have to keep an eye on your income. Sandbox is just a sandbox, but it’s fun for those, who want to play without any limits.
What makes Planet Coaster the best amusement park sim compared to others is the amount of detail on how you can build rides and decorations. You can set your turn and height angle low on roller coasters while building or even have automatic completion on it if you don’t have an idea how to finish your ride. The decoration system has a great base to work with and it reminds of professional game engine or 3D animation editors. The game is also graphically best-looking amusement park sim there currently is. With this much detail on the construction tool and the look of the game, people have created the most breath-taking CGI rides, that can be seen in YouTube. The game has a big user base with plenty of user-created blueprints of rides and surrounding to copy and paste to your park if you don’t want to build your own.
The detailed construction tool is also a bit hard to learn in the beginning, which makes Planet Coaster a bit difficult entry for new players, but those willing to learn the mechanics of the construction tool and old Roller Coaster fans should have an amazing time with this game!
Publisher: Frontier Developments
Developer: Frontier Developments
Platforms: Microsof Windows, Playstation 4, Xbox One, Playstation 5, Xbox Series X/S, macOS
Release Date: 17.11.2016
Genres: Construction and management simulation
ESRB: 7
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