RollerCoaster Tycoon Adventures – Review
The mainstream RollerCoaster Tycoon games haven’t been the center of attention over the last few years, as the quality of the original was never paralleled. While the graphical prowess was often upgraded, the mechanics were often very tedious to work with and the newer games were riddled with bugs, making them unplayable. RollerCoaster Tycoon World, for example, faded to the background becoming a mere mirage of something that could have been exquisite. This time however, Atari tries to bring the series to Nintendo’s new hybrid console, and for the most part they have created a fairly enjoyable handheld experience, albeit a dumbed down version of what made the series great.
Story
The game does have a few story elements, but it can’t be called a real story per se. You’ll be thrown into the role of a park manager who will have to make decisions for his park on a day-to-day basis. Sometimes the game will throw you a bit of a bone when it comes to its storytelling by presenting you with a few choice options, allowing different outcomes for several contrasted situations. Overall this concept works to give the game a bit of a backbone, but for the most part it’s not needed. The scenarios also have certain goals to reach, but again, a real story is nowhere to be found.
Graphics
RollerCoaster Tycoon Adventures looks quite cute, but it will never blow you away. All the attractions have their own distinct appearance, and while more than often most of them will not make a good-looking whole when you have a park full of different ones, it will still keep cute esthetic we just mentioned. Other details will also be visible, like people running around the park, but once again, this looks very simplistic and more than often your park will feel like a desolate wasteland, rather than a hustling and bustling place. Also, we feel like the developers could have done more with the character models of the visitors, as the game only has a handful of differently colored models, and children are just shrunk down versions of the adult models, which look like absolute crap.
We quickly noticed that the option to take screenshots was turned off in this game, which is quite peculiar as this game has no sensitive content. At the beginning all seemed well, even if things were presented in a simplistic fashion, but when we reached the point where we could place actual rollercoasters, shit had reached the fan, with several fans being spread out behind the original fan. Before you know it, you’ll have attractions running over in another attraction, or tracks that simply go through pathways or other tracks, making it obvious that the developers simply created a hit detection spot for the station of a rollercoaster, rather than the actual tracks. This means that you can place rollercoaster stations next to each other, without even looking at the tracks, which will certainly create a ravel of tracks and very chaotic visuals in the process. If you’re just like us, you’ll indeed experiment by making a fairly crazy looking park, which will certainly create frame drops.
Sound
The sound design of RTC Adventures is very simplistic, just like its visuals. You’ll have a fairly calm background track playing throughout the levels, and you’ll hear the screams and mumbles of your visitors and a few other sound effects. There’s not that much more to explore or to expect when it comes to the musical capacities of this title.
Gameplay
RollerCoaster Tycoon Adventures is a simulation game in which you’ll have to create an amusement park with as many attractions as possible, all while also creating food courts, item shops, basic sanitary installations, and so on. Unlike the original game everything has been dumbed down, making it a mix of the mobile version of RCT that was released not that long ago, and an accessible children’s version, which might not be that attractive for longtime fans of the series.
You can opt to play the game with everything unlocked, the make an amusement park as you please, without having to research new attractions and buildings. If you opt for the first mode, you can simply build, design, and go nuts without any restrictions. The game will allow you to build your ideal park, without having to build a shitload of identical attractions in order to gain status and fame for better ‘permits’. These permits are used in the game, as well as the research, to halt your progress when you decide to play the game the traditional way by having to build up your park from scratch with limited funds and technology available. While the research and permit mechanics do have some merits, they make the game rather tedious in the long run. We miss more management functions like there were in the original, where you had to hire entertainers, build queues (your attractions no longer have queues), manage your maintenance personnel, where you had to keep your park clean, etc. All of the aforementioned management features are omitted from this new release, pretty much only allowing you to build with or without restrictions. Of course, there are some small management features still present, such as being able to adjust prices of attractions, having to build enough service buildings and placing decorations in order to boost adjoining attractions.
The game does support touch screen features, which make the game easy to control when playing in the handheld mode. You can easily draw lines for pathways, or you can simply drag and drop attractions wherever you want them to be. It actually feels as if there was more time spent on developing the touch controls than actually creating the game.
Conclusion
RollerCoaster Tycoon Adventures does have some good ideas and it does make the series accessible for a slightly younger audience without becoming too hard in terms of management features, but it also falls flat in its graphical department and when it comes to the game’s mechanics. Overall the game is still enjoyable as a timesink, but one you should only pick up in a sales bin, from the back of an open truck or when rummaging through your neighbor’s trash.
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it is fun
for a moment