Parkitect

I like to build rollercoasters

As a huge fan of Rollercoaster Tycoon, Parkitect is the perfect tycoon game. The only thing missing is the "nostalgic touch" from the childhood. Parkitect is a really good game with great sound and layout.

I beat the campaign in 95 hours! Only a few scenarios need to be backtracked in the beginning for completion. One pro is the game is fun and play style is straightforward. One con is the achivements do not always unlock.

Bluntly put, this isn't a theme park sim, it's a theme park logistics sim. If you're the the sort of person who enjoys the thrills of having to actually organize food deliveries to your park, then go wild. I'm not. I prefer more abstraction, and less distraction. Parkitect adds many things which could be considered features, but they feel more as misfeatures (and performance sinks) to my personal thoughts. Immersion, item deliveries, staff paths, and more. Introducing these feel like putting in purposeful flaws into what would otherwise be a quite fun game. There's too many moving parts and none of the individual parts do a really good job to add to the whole sum of things. The artstyle which while I understand the idea of, is just completely flat compared to the joy of a well designed pixel art rendition of a scanned 3D object or hand drawn art; most of the rides feel like shapes that were glued together in a 3D editor. The Visual Communication (menus, character design, animation, UI, camera, colors, typefaces, & presentation of information), is probably the worst aspect of the game. It feels bland, claustrophobic, underdesigned, lifeless; a masterclass in how to make menus feel bad. Since this game is 99% menus, that's a BAD thing. One thing which I've found particularly baffling is that you can (in sandbox mode) completely flood the park. To what end, is completely unknown, seeing as the water overlay effect would render such a park innavigable. Why even allow the player to do this? I get what Texel Raptor was trying to do, but I don't think they quite stuck the landing. Complaints about the UI have been consistent since before release and I find it rather baffling that no effort has been placed towards improving this aspect. Hiring a graphic designer could prove lucrative.

I play a lot of these kinds of games and it is pretty standard for the camera controls to be right-click drag to move the camera and middle-click drag to rotate the camera. I'm getting older now so I find having to undo my muscle memory to be tedious and frustrating. I don't play games to be frustrated. In Parkitect, to drag the camera you use the middle button and to rotate you do the same while holding left-alt. No problem I think, I will just tweak the controls a bit but no, the right mouse button is "reserved" and can't be used for anything. Which leaves me in a dilemma. Do I spend hours unlearning my muscle memories and then create new ones thereby potentially having to undo all that when I change to a new game? Or should I just go back to Planet Coaster? In principle I prefer Parkitect because it is a native Linux game but perhaps not enough to overcome this first world problem. The tutorial I played through did introduce some interesting new ideas such as staff pathing and store restocking that Planet Coaster doesn't have so I may yet persevere through with this but it is still slightly annoying. So if you are a crotchety old fart who is set in his ways you should be aware of this issue, other than that I'm sure it's a great game.