Planet Coaster
There’s a simple question to ask yourself regarding Planet Coaster. Do you want a management simulator?
Or do you want a toy to create theme parks with?
A description that has been bandied around Planet Coaster is Simulation Evolved. Quite what it has evolved from is impossible to discern as this is a truly appalling management simulator. Where Theme Park in 1994 might have used some smoke and mirrors, the systems in place were elegant, offered clarity and enough depth to justify ge tting too involved in creating your park.
It’s the fact that people want to get involved in creating a perfect park is what Planet Coaster exists for, what it thrives on. To say you can create anything is something of a lie, there is a limitation on how many individual pieces can be used in a building but if you’re willing to squint a bit to ignore the lack of fine detail then you can create anything. Even more amazing, the chances are someone has already created what you want and you can poke through Steam Workshop to look at some genuinely impressive creations and then have them in your game in moments.
As far as management goes, everything is badly explained and much of it is badly implemented. To take a simple example, you can set the price of products, but you’re not told whether you’re affecting the amount of profit or the amount of revenue, so pricing is just guess work. Any hint of realism is undermined immediately by every shop has an infinite amount of stock and their produce doesn’t seem to go off.
Poking around the Steam Workshop feels like scrolling through eBay, largely junk no-one wants mixed in with some genuinely jaw-dropping creations. Where eBay demands money for you to run amok, here you can pick and choose and mix your own creations with just precisely what is required from the workshop to make your park just what you want.
If pricing things in shops is bad, setting the ticket prices for the park itself is much, much worse. Create a neat park, a bunch of rides all priced reasonably, some scenery and pick a price for your two different entry tickets. Now put the game on to maximum speed, then watch your profit. Now fiddle with the prices for months on end, wholly ignoring your park whilst watching even $0.10 price changes make you veer from generating Scrooge McDuck money pools to plunging towards bankruptcy faster than if you’d hired Donald Trump to manage the business. There’s no logic to it, no feedback is offered. Just an appallingly implemented system.
Integrating things together is the challenge to creating a beautiful park, of course. It’s not just about picking cool things, it’s about how they’re linked together, how they work, making sure things are neither bunched together nor too far apart. Placing paths and queues does often become a bit of a chore, but as long as you rely on keyboard shortcuts you’ll generally be able to do what you want. Being able to link two points with a quick movement would be better, but the system in place isn’t disastrous.
The selling point of the management is that each individual in the park has their own likes and dislikes and their own budget. A nudge in ticket price means they’re less willing to spend in the park, hence the vast fluctuations, but there’s almost nothing you can do to interact with the individuals. Even on a basic level, ie. a level that Theme Park had, you can’t create one-way systems or place signposts to direct people and instead you have to rely on visitors making use of something between telepathy and osmosis. The feedback offered is, surprisingly, useless. Visitors really don’t like litter, but once you’ve sorted that you’re simply told that queues are too long or that prices are too high, both immediately obvious if you’re paying attention.
Creating roller coasters is broadly like laying paths but, even more so. The different types of coaster dictate what you can create, but with the emphasis on what the next piece to be laid is you’ll probably end up with a relatively freeform creation unless you really plan but I’m sure each individual will develop preferences. Personally, I find there’s something curiously satisfying about making coasters that are wholly reliant on momentum. I have started calling this design philosophy ‘The Jeremy Corbyn Approach’.
As well as individual feedback, your park is rated on a scale, with zero stars meaning there is nothing there and any number higher than that is an improvement and, theoretically, this is what your park entry price can be based upon. The rating measures the obvious things, such as rides and scenery with a multiplier for the marketing that’s taking place, but the numbers are given no context or relevance. It’s impossible to tell what a good rating is, what the important parts of the rating are, just that the bigger the number the better the park is. It’s wholly useless. Basing any rating on scenery when visitors can’t tell the difference between matching scenery and randomly placed shapes is also strange.
Generally, the process for creating coasters is very good. Testing as you go does dramatically send crash test dummies and their transportation flying around the park but works well and in combination with the addition of heat-maps to highlight areas where things are making people too ill makes the process relatively easy to follow. That said, it’s very difficult to understand what the numbers actually represent. Logic suggests that at 3.84 on the Nausea scale, the vomit is in the mouth of the punters but crucially isn’t on their friends and family, whereas at 12.85 on the same scale the vomit is simply coming out as blood and intestines, but instead the game seems to settle on an average which seems wholly nonsensical. Shrug.
The game offers the option to run three different types of marketing, differentiated only by the more expensive option just works better, each able to be targeted to different groups. The three visitor types, Adults, Families and Teenagers clearly have different requirements and targeting one over the other is…Broadly impossible because there’s no feedback as to what the differences are. Families presumably like family rides, but the difference between an adult and a teenager seems impossible clarify. Maybe teenagers have less income? If so, not sure why you’d want to target them. Who knows. Teenagers slouch a bit.
Starting without a plan will result in a mess of a park, but if you’ve got a target in mind then you’re well on the way to success. With the aim to create a Star Wars themed park, my options on the workshop were fairly vast. An amazing Jakku-themed rollercoaster emulating the Falcon barrel-rolling through a wrecked Star Destroyer was the first to be added, the terrain raised up around it and the area nearby decorated with a buried AT-AT and AT-ST, then a cantina, complete with an approximation of Greedo and Han having a shoot-out and a range of drinks and Mexican food on offer. Rey’s Speeder and Anakin’s Pod are parked outside.
Staffing is terrible. In some situations the new ability to allocate rotas makes ensuring the staff do their jobs more easily, but it’s not always an improvement on just marking out a route and rapidly becomes messy. Staff training is nowhere near the excellent system in Theme Hospital, it’s instead no more involved than clicking a button every couple of months or so and giving them a pay rise, with the added tedium of having to do it for each individual staff member. In a continuation of the individual decision making the staff will quit if they aren’t enjoying their jobs enough, generally due to not having enough to do. You can’t move them to an alternate role, you simply have to redevelop the park around them or watch them quit. Then you have to click twice to hire a replacement so why you’d try and keep them happy isn’t clear. They serve more slowly when they’re miserable, but if they’re miserable because they’re not busy, who cares?
A model of the Falcon parked up in the hangar at Mos Eisley is roundly ignored by the punters until a new rollercoaster is added beyond that, simulating the first Death Star trench run. It was somewhat tame, so a variety of explosions and smoke make it seem much more threatening, and some R2-D2 themed food outlets give a bit more income. And then, the pièce de résistance, a coaster simulating the chase around the Death Star II, positioned miles in the sky. A laser from another Death Star is added, then another separate Mon Calamari cruiser or two for it to target. Quite why this level of nerdery is so satisfying it’s hard to tell, but by the force it is. (Wholly unrelated, the theme tune sounds like Lithuania’s 2015 Eurovision entry from a couple of years ago and I really like that.)
The long and short of it, is that there are two games here. One of them is astounding, bringing the possibilities to create the most amazing theme parks possible to even those without the skill to do anything more than download things off Steam Workshop and offering even more to those patient enough to create from scratch. The other is an appalling management game, incoherent, awkward and completely lacking in fun that gives you no reason or motivation to create something as wonderful as you can. People will enjoy it despite its flaws, but at some point you have to realise it’s just a slightly more interactive and slightly less useful version of SketchUp.
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