![]() ![]() ![]() But practically it simply does not equate to a game with any kind of longevity.I still love business-sim games, so I was super excited to find out that Rollercoaster Tycoon Adventures was coming to my favorite console, the Nintendo Switch. On a very basic level, that’s appealing enough, because everyone dreams of being a theme park designer. It’s a shallow grind, which challenges none of the player’s management skills, and comes across more as an opportunity to simply decorate a theme park. RollerCoaster Tycoon: Adventures is pleasant on the eyes, but is in every other way a disappointment. Unfortunately, the attached story is anything but memorable, and better examples of the simulation genre don’t need a dedicated story mode at all the sandbox is enough of an emergent storytelling experience for players to really care about what they’re doing anyway. Sadly, simulators are meant to be strategic and carefully paced, and “time attack” doesn’t work in that context, so it’s a slog to work through all the scenarios, though the setups for some of them are quite amusing.įinally, there’s a story career mode, which is as good as Adventures gets, insofar as the gameplay and its relationship to the structure are concerned. Each of those have specific challenges that need to be completed in order to clear the scenario, and because there’s no real lose state in Adventures, the challenge is in completing the objectives as quickly as possible. In addition to the sandbox mode, which for so many of us is the default way to play a simulator, there’s a large number of scenarios to play through. Redeeming Adventures somewhat is the depth of play modes. Similarly, where so much of the sharp satire of the original RollerCoaster Tycoon came from the responses of the consumers to their experiences with your rides, this time around, they’re much happier to be sheep herded meekly about the place. Not that it’s difficult to keep them happy, because you have to really go out of your way to annoy your guests before they’ll respond. There’s no need to really care about the opinions of visitors to your park, since there’s no real consequence if they have some kind of complaint. All you can do then is mess around with the scenery and decorations. Unfortunately, the balance is out here too you’ll hit a point soon enough where, unless you build multiples of the same building, you’ve going to run out of things to do while you wait for the next unlock. You can research one new building at a time, and after paying for that research upfront, you simply sit back and wait a while for that building to unlock. Progress is earned in the game via research. Imagine the complaints if someone spend real money on microtransactions, only to wind up with a “Game Over” screen? No, mobile games need to be structured differently in order to be exclusively rewarding and endlessly playable, and so Adventures likewise only ever rewards. This is because Adventures is based on a mobile title, and while the developers have done the right thing and stripped all the microtransactions out, there remains the fundamental design feature of free-to-play games you can’t lose. ![]() It’s possible to earn money more slowly – and rides “degrade” over time, meaning that you can charge less for people to use them, but it’s quite impossible for the park to go bankrupt. There’s no need to balance a budget, because there’s no way for revenue to decline. Unfortunately, it’s also impossible to fail at Adventures. You’ll be building rides, hiring janitors, repair people and entertainers, and managing food prices just as you did in the RollerCoaster Tycoon games of old. Sadly, “superficial” is where RollerCoaster Tycoon: Adventures starts and stops. I have a great sense of design for these things. There’s plenty of rides to choose between, as well as decorative objects, and it’s a great deal of fun to lay out rollercoasters so it passes by fireworks and other stylistic scenic elements. Superficially, it’s a delight to design and lay out your theme parks. RollerCoaster Tycoon: Adventures almost looks like it could be a game that lives up to the original at first impressions. Right back from the release of the original in 1999, it has been a series of pure wish fulfillment after all, who doesn’t want to build and manage a theme park? It also had a wicked sense of humour… particularly when you built a too-steep rollercoaster, and then watched as it threw people off it, sky high. RollerCoaster Tycoon is one of my pet loves. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |