Parkgoers speak in their own 'Planco' language, which is cute/annoying depending on what side of bed you got out on. Building, meanwhile, is no more complicated than snapping pre-fabricated parts together, and the impressive array of beautifully designed building blocks and scenery (covering modern, pirate, sci-fi, western and fairytale themes) means that there's almost limitless scope for creativity. Coaster design merely requires you to drag around track segments in order to adjust curves, elevation and banking, while landscaping is simply a matter of geological sculpting: you can shape hills, dig out pits and tunnels, roughen edges, smooth corners, and raise water levels, all with an enormous degree of precision, simply by pulling and prodding the earth. ![]() Planet Coaster's toolset is tactile, intuitive and incredibly powerful, making it absurdly easy to create complex, richly detailed parks. In terms of execution and design potential, however, they're a revelation. Yes, it has all the classic management elements of the genre - you'll build new rides, deploy staff, and constantly fiddle with prices to appease to your ever-fickle paying customers - but Planet Coaster's main focus is on delivering an unprecedented level of creative control, finally enabling insatiable tinkerers like me to marry functional park design with dazzling degrees of theme and flair.Īdmittedly, on a fundamental level, Planet Coaster's core construction and customisation tools are nothing new you can design coaster tracks, shape the landscape, install practical items like bins, benches, shops, and then theme it all up with topiary and assorted bits of scenery. We'll have a review of that on Eurogamer shortly.īy contrast though, Planet Coaster is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to park customisation. In an aggressive or more likely stupid piece of scheduling, Atari put out Rollercoaster Tycoon World right next to Planet Coaster. Games like Bullfrog's Theme Park and the seminal Rollercoaster Tycoon series certainly tried to sate the whims of budding park designers and engineers, but the obvious technical limitations of the time meant that, even once each series had transitioned to full 3D, your creations were still fairly abstract, rudimentary entities, allowing for only very limited attention to detail. That to me is the essence of theme park design, and it's why most theme park games have always fallen a little short in my eyes. It's a neatly thematic solution to a very practical problem, and indicative of the lengths that Disney's imagineers will go to to ensure that their park's spell is never broken. ![]() It's a wonderful scene-setting moment, full of deliciously creepy ambience, but really that whole sequence serves one purpose alone: to distract you while the elevator floor you're standing on creaks and groans its way out of the mansion facade (built way before Disney knew what the final ride would entail), and into the far more spacious main show building, tucked safely out of sight behind a hill. And then, with a flash of lightning, it's onto the ride proper. ![]() On entering Disney's spooky old house, you're ushered into a windowless chamber that begins to change almost imperceptibly as your disembodied host bids you welcome, elongating so that its once perfectly innocent paintings stretch into ghoulish tableaux revealing the gristly fates of the mansion's inhabitants. If you've ever been to Disneyland, California, you'll probably know about the so-called stretch rooms that kick off the park's legendary Haunted Mansion ride. It's not without its problems, but Planet Coaster is the finest park construction simulator yet.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |