Rollercoaster Tycoon is an inspiring and successful attempt to make an innovative theme park management simulator.
Rollercoaster Tycoon is, first and foremost, a theme park management simulator. It sounds like a great idea for a videogame, and, after this magical first hour of playing, you'll wonder at the amount of work that has been poured into this game. Rollercoaster Tycoon is ambitious to the point of ridiculous, but it's one of those rare games that actually fulfil those ambitions and ultimately create an immersive and groundbreaking gameplay experience.
Rollercoaster Tycoon first packs in an immense amount of freedom. For the most part, you can build whatever you want, when you want, where you want, and how you want. This thrilling first hour of gameplay incorporates a lengthy but worthwhile learning curve, that isn't too sharp, but still manages to pack in a lot of ideas into a relatively basic design. Without putting off the more casual or impatient gamers in this world, Rollercoaster Tycoon eases you slowly but surely into its universe and ensures that you will never leave.
So, anyway. Rollercoaster Tycoon lets you build whatever you want, whenever you want, wherever you want, and however you want. Whether you want to build a park entirely for the little kids, one for the family, or one for those thrill ride extremists, then Rollercoaster Tycoon gives you that freedom, and more.
Building rides is done on a slick, user-friendly interface that's unbelievably easy to use but still incorporates a lot of scope for complex rollercoaster design. While you can build pre-made designs at the click of a mouse, it's a thousand times more enjoyable to create your own rollercoaster masterpieces, bit by bit, and then watching them in all their monolithic glory.
It's not just rollercoasters either. You can build merry-go-rounds, launched freefalls, log flumes, water slides, helter-skelters, top spins, and many many more rides for a lot less expense of both in-game money and your valuable spare time.
Rollercoaster Tycoon happens to be very addictive for these reasons, and could well destroy your social life on a disastrous scale if you let it. The hours will slip by as stealthily as a greased-oil version of Sam Fisher, and before you know what's happening, your park has failed its objective and it's way past bedtime. And that's just your own fault.
But, all this fun comes at a price. Rollercoaster Tycoon isn't some sort of dreamland where you're let loose to build your own magical park.
It's a management game, and that means that sometimes you have to pay the inevitable consequences. Financial debt, loans, vomit all over your park, dirty paths, rides breaking down, and countless other niceties are ready to spew all over your golden creations and turn your masterpiece into a soggy square mile of watered-down commercial failure.
You'll need to pinpoint problems and then fix them almost endlessly before you can even begin to find time to build a new ride or attraction. Your time must be used wisely in Rollercoaster Tycoon, and I cannot stress that enough - at times it can be a very demanding game, and this all stems back to its overly ambitious concept.
And, of course, because of this game's huge amount of inspiration and ambition, it's bound to have flaws. These flaws are largely in the audio and the graphics, but there are a few irritations in the gameplay engine that must be mentioned and outlined.
First off - you can shape your park's land, by adjusting its height and adding slopes here and there, but this control is fiddly and unresponsive. It's basically done using the mouse, but you're forced to painstakingly edit it a shape at a time, and if you go wrong, of course to you have to pay money to right it.
The game's main structure is a single-player campaign where you can only unlock the next level by completing the one before it. And this works fine - but there is a lot of repetition in the mission objectives and you will find your interest in the game wavering in the latter half of the game. I have been playing for years but I have never found the heart to go further in the game than about 70%, and this all stems from the obvious repeated objectives. A lack of variation is often the game's downfall.
Yet, all in all, if you play the game right, and if you are willing the face the sometimes harsh difficulty, then you will find Rollercoaster Tycoon to be a truly wonderful experience that will keep you hooked for days, months, even years.
Now it's time to address the graphics in Rollercoaster Tycoon. These do the job fine and represents your theme park in a perfectly acceptable vision. But the problem is, it's all so... meh.
The visuals in Rollercoaster Tycoon are utterly devoid of character. It almost hurts to outline a flaw in such an amazing creation, but a bit of colour and panache here and there wouldn't have gone amiss. The graphics are very identikit and it is painful to say this. Look at some of the screenshots or even the gamespace banner for this game and you'll see what I mean... this is one of the elements of the game that DIDN'T get improved on in the successor.
The audio reaches similar heights. Sure, the music from the carousel brings back fond memories of funfairs and candyfloss, but that's about it. The quality of the sound feels like it's been recorded from a mobile phone - and not a recent model either.
So, there you have it. Rollercoaster Tycoon is an inspiring and successful attempt to make an innovative theme park management simulator. Although it falls to a merely average showing in the graphics and sound department, you can look past an ugly face to see a true gem of a game that shouldn't be missed by anybody. "Don't judge a book by it's cover"? This is the perfect example.