The overall experience feels designed for a more niche market than a general gaming audience, but even that niche will find the novelty wears off quickly. The audio too is a lacklustre experience, with tracks befitting the experience quickly feeling irritating. There is limited customisation options that essentially resort to removing a facade or including it and the general quality gives the feel you are just running the “on ride” feature of a more popular simulation game. The textures are simple and the art assets nothing to shout home about. Graphically, the game is not incredibly taxing. Some rides also have the ability to control the ride itself, such as riding the dodgems or controlling the tilt of the Tagada which helps to provide some extra distraction. You can then choose the engine function to control the speed of the ride and the multi-tool to add lights, smoke and other effects to your ride. Choose your ride and, after loading, it will give you features to open and close the ride queue and vehicle, causing patrons to fill the seats. The controls all use the touch screen features of the Nintendo Switch and are fairly self explanatory.
There isn’t really much to talk about in terms of game play.
The “game” has no goal, no antagonist, and no real reason to play, more it is a series of tools that can be applied to the real life workings of theme park machinery. In reality, you aren’t really simulating a park, rather the individual rides within a park. The basic premise here is in the word simulator. On reading the press release information I was curious, these seemed like named rides, could it be that you could recreate parks from around the world, similar to fan builds within previous game? Alas, no. I’ve often dipped in and out of business management simulation games since the early day’s of “Theme Park” and was curious to see what made this stand out as a “rival.” I had seen this title appear on my radar a week or so ago, but it wasn’t until seeing an article suggesting that “Rollercoaster Tycoon has a new rival” that I decided to take the bait and request a review copy.
We’ll update you as soon as a specific release date is marked down.So, for a little back story. Planet Coaster is due to release in Summer 2020 on Xbox One and PS4. At the very least players can expect the console version to include the free updates pushed to Planet Coaster thus far.
We don’t know yet what’s going to be included in the Xbox and PS4 versions, but the console trailer looks like it might have a few of the DLC packs snuck in there. Three years from launch it’s finally time for funfair construction to arrive on consoles. Along the way Frontier Developments also pushed out a fair few free updates as well top add extra content to the game without further cost.
Since release, Planet Coaster proved popular enough to receive a vast roster of DLC packs ranging from movie studios and haunted houses to tie-ins with Knight Rider and Back to the Future. However, several reviews also noted that the park management side of the game could have done with jazzing up a touch as well. It received largely positive reviews at the time, praising the wonderful aesthetic and detailed, freeform construction of new rides as a great way to lose yourself in the joys of ride construction. Naturally, players quickly went to work not just creating their own brilliant parks, but also meticulously recreating famous real-life parks like the UK’s Alton Towers as well. Theme Park simulator Planet Coaster will be releasing on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 next summer.įrontier Developments brought the old-school theme park sim to the modern age when Planet Coaster released in 2016, offering a massive range and style of rides for players to cram their parks with.