RollerCoaster Tycoon® 3: Complete Edition

I've played all of the RCT games since day zero, even sharing parks and competing with others online, so you could call me a 'hardcore' fan. When the 3rd version came out the community shunned it. It had silly hardware requirements for its time, which made it sluggish on our prehistoric machines, the user interface was (and still is) clunky and tedious to use, and it was released on the back of two horrific expansions for the 2nd game, which basically caricatured the best part of the game - theming. Having said that, this game is still fundamentally the original Rollercoaster Tycoon at its core, which makes it an excellent game. The actual building mode is still very enjoyable, and being able to explore your creations in 3D has been the missing piece for years. Admitedly the UI takes some getting used to, and even then is frustrating, but it is by no means game breaking. When landscaping, heed my advice and stick strictly to isometric blocks, you will quickly find yourself annoyed at disjointed landscapes if you use any of the brush tools. Hand crafting every block of land IS fun, just look at Minecraft! Plus you can create stunning vistas this way. I love the rides (except the pre-themed ones), the water slides, and the whole look and feel of this game. They undoubtedly could have done more here and there, but in general it is an excellent addition to the series, and in a nut shell, everything you'd expect from a sequel (especially one developed by another studio)... better in some places, less charming in others. Buy the game, jump straight to sandbox mode, and enjoy.

In this game you build and manage a theme park. The big attraction of this game is building roller coasters by your own design. The UI for building is a bit dated, but it gets the job done. The best part of the game is you can switch to first-person view, and ride your virtual coasters. This game lacks any dynamic challenges, like competitors or variable economic environment (e.g. trying to retain your credit rating with a negative balance). So it becomes a one-dimensional time-management game: build some things to get cash, and then sit back until you have enough cash to build the next thing. It can be quite fun to put together your own roller coaster, but the core game isn't very gratifying. Also it suffers from bugs. There's rendering bugs: e.g. transparent walls underground, and garbage clipping below the ground. There's logic bugs: e.g. people getting stuck in rides under certain conditions. And there's also other bugs e.g. people mysteriously ending up in unused parts of your park. It would take too long to explain exactly how these affect the game, but in short: they're not game breaking, but very tedious, or ugly. The roller coasters behave a bit static/unrealistic, because it has backward compatibility with old roller coaster designs from previous games. It takes a bit getting used to; personally I find it to be less fun the better I understand it, but I'm someone who tries to get maximum ratings for my designs. If you forget the game mechanics, it can be quite fun to ride ridiculous draconian life-threatening contraptions of your own design. If you have a sort of a scale-model-building mindset, it can be quite fun and relaxing. (Though the sounds might be annoying to you.) The game provides some building blocks with which you can build themed sceneries. It's all tile based, and not all parts fit together. If you like such building exercises in other games, this is probably a game for you. If you're looking for a fun challenge, it probably isn't for you.

First off: I had played 1 & 2 before this game came out and I enjoyed both of them quite a bit. I will acknowledge that this one somehow is missing some bit of magic that the others had. That said, it's still an amazing game. It is a lot of fun and offers more variety than either of its predecessors. More importantly, it has yet to be surpassed by a followup because there hasn't been one. If you are interested in building a theme park and roller coasters, this is still the most recent option, and so I have to give it a nod. Even if you enjoy 1 & 2, heck, especially if you enjoy 1 & 2, this game is worth getting as it is a solid game in its own right.

GoG has done a pretty good job of summing up the good things about this game, so i'll focus on the not so good. 1: it doesn't seem like they ever properly tested the two expansion packs together. Placing pool paths over an animal enclosure would result in guests falling through the pool paths into the enclosure! 2: While the new "smooth ground" looked good it made building and connecting up paths a bit of a pain. since ground level paths could be at any of a huge number of levels while raised paths were limited to discrete units of level. 3: collision detection was buggy, sometimes you could build a combination of placements in one order but not in another. 4: As parks got big the game ran into performance problems. This was especially true if you used certain ride types a lot (aqua blaster slides were a major offender, they were the easiest way to get high ratings on a pool ride but they were also very heavy on the engine) 5: If an area gets too busy guests could get into a horrible tangle that was a major PITA to recover from (removing stuff and flattening ground was the only way I found) 6: if you tried to load any of the supplied audio tracks for mixmaster it would say they were in a format that could not be properly synchronised. Don't get me wrong, the game was great and I got many many hours of fun out of it but it always felt like it could have been so much better.

Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 Platinum has decent audio (the thrilled screams of children on the rides, the cha-ching of purchased food and gifts) and pleasant 3D visuals that become a bit ew when zoomed in too far. The sound gets repetitive and the graphics are nothing to write home over, but it's difficult to keep the audio consistently fresh when dealing with a game that has basically the same set environment for the player to engage with over the course of thirty to several hundred hours. Also, it's easy to tell what's what and who's who when visually panning over any given park, so the graphics are certainly doing their job (just try turning on Majesty 2 and comparing its 3D “upgrade” to that of the original Majesty and you'll see how this particular endeavor can go very wrong). That said, the meat of Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 Platinum is the gameplay, and for tycoon fans, the measure of success in that area is whether or not you still enjoy milking visitors for their dollars after dozens of hours of designing, selecting, rotating, and building. For me, it's a huge success. This is the type of game that I will play for hours and then come back to, even years later. It caters to both the micromanagement-heavy players and those that just want to sit back and rake in some cash without going to a lot of trouble (but who still want to build a beautiful and functionally rewarding park). What's the low point? There is at least one game-breaking financial factor that can ensure you endless money and which doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's a single feature that you can avoid building in order to keep your game balanced and any veteran of this game knows exactly what I'm talking about. Also, the missions can slog on a bit and the terrain can get unnecessarily frustrating when trying to build a good coaster. Often you won't know why a certain section can't fit somewhere and you might spent way too much time trying to figure out how to get around or over or under a certain spot. That said, buy this game. Every title has its rough spots and the rough spots here are small in comparison to how fun this game is overall. Enjoy it. Love it. Play it with your family. This is definitely a game to be shared.