RollerCoaster Tycoon 3: Wild! Impressions - First Look

RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 has already gotten wet thanks to the first expansion pack, Soaked!. And the new game is about to get wild with the second expansion from Frontier and Atari. RollerCoaster Tycoon 3: Wild! brings an assortment of animals to your theme park to keep the peeps happy and entertained so they'll keep coming back for more, thus keeping your park in the green.

Wild! lets you turn your theme park into a wild kingdom of sorts by letting you purchase dozens of animals, build specific habitats, set up shows, and even breed the animals. There are dozens of animals in the game, and they are divided into six different classes. You'll see the usual zoo attractions, such as tigers, lions, chimps, and elephants, and each has its own type of habitat in the park. In addition to building a habitat for each animal, you'll need to assign trainers to feed and clean up after the animals. Each animal has specific stats relating to hunger, thirst, health, and happiness. You'll need to make sure to care for your animals properly to keep them happy. If you mistreat or neglect your animals, the Animal Protection Board will come and take them away. In addition to keeping your animals fed and building a place for them to live, you can also interact with them by buying them toys or tickling them.

Most of the animals in Wild! just go about their normal tasks while the peeps line up to watch. However, you can also create more-interactive attractions with the animals. For example, you can use the RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 "MixMaster" application to create a custom lion show, with tricks like sticking the trainer's head into the lion's mouth and getting a lion to leap through hoops or balance on a ball. There are also some animal-themed transportation rides available. You can let your peeps hitch a ride on the back of an elephant, or even create your own SUV safari that takes peeps on a ride through an outback-style range where animals can be seen in their natural surroundings.

Most animals, however, will be located in fenced-off areas in the park, where you can build habitats that provide shelter to meet the specific needs of a certain type of animal. You can put a chimp in a rhinoceros habitat, but your chimp won't be too happy about it, and peeps don't respond positively to sad animals. Different species of animals won't interact for the most part, but if you're feeling sadistic, you can, for instance, put a gazelle in a lion pen. The gentle ungulates will flee for their lives before disappearing in a puff of smoke when attacked.

Fortunately, there are several types of fences you can use to keep your animals from running wild and terrorizing guests. A gazelle is prone to jumping great heights, so you'll need to choose a tall, chain-link fence to keep them contained. If you don't maintain the habitats, animals will find a way to break out. If this happens, you'll need to use your tranquilizer gun to sedate the animal and get it back into its pen. When you activate the tranquilizer mode, you'll be taken up into a helicopter that flies around the park, letting you zoom in with your scope like a sniper rifle and shoot tranquilizer darts at your escaped critter.

The best way to make sure your animals are happy and healthy is to put the same types of animals in the appropriate habitat. If you have a male and female of a certain type of animal, they may breed and you'll get a baby animal that you can sell for profit. Since they can breed several times, it seems advantageous to purchase your animals in pairs to get as many offspring as possible. If an animal is healthy enough, you can also release it into the wild, and there's a visitor adoption program that lets peeps donate money for animal care.

In addition to the animals, there are other new attractions in this expansion as well. There are two new themes this time around: jungle and prehistoric. The jungle theme is basically just that, a park with various jungle attractions featuring exotic animals. The prehistoric theme is focused on dinosaurs. You can't quite create a real Jurassic Park here, but you can purchase all kinds of animatronic dinosaurs to entertain your guests. Other attractions include an insect house, and a sort of "Honey I Shrunk the Guests" experience where the peeps can view huge models of various insects. There are also animal-themed services, such as a Dino Burger restaurant and souvenir shops that sell animal-themed merchandise. You can hire staff to dress up in mascot costumes and stand outside habitats to further entertain guests.

Wild! also lets you make extra money by selling ad space in your park. You can place billboards in your park that will bring in advertising money from a variety of real-world sponsors. That's right, RollerCoaster Tycoon has jumped on the in-game advertising bandwagon. The game features ad-server technology, so when you're connected to the Internet, the ads on your billboards will get updated. For instance, you might see a McDonald's ad for some time, which will then will switch to a Coke ad at some point. The billboards seem small enough that these ads hopefully won't interfere too much with the game at all, and Atari is hoping that, if anything, the billboards give your park more of a real-world look. Of course, since this is still RollerCoaster Tycoon, there are plenty of rides as well. In all, there are 18 flat rides and eight coasters. All of the roller coasters are based on either real-world rides or ones that are currently being planned. The two biggest new roller coasters added here are the split-track Seismic, and the famous G-Force coaster from Europe.

The look and interface of Wild! haven't changed from the previous expansion and game. You can still view each roller coaster from the perspective of a passenger, and you can now also use an "animal cam" view, which lets you see the park from the perspective of any of your critters. The animals don't seem difficult or complicated to care for; you simply build a habitat, assign a trainer, and set how often you want the animal to be fed. It doesn't require a lot of micromanagement to keep your animals happy and healthy, and it doesn't look like the animals will interfere with the construction and maintenance of the rest of the park.

Exotic animals are inherently intriguing, so Wild! seems like a natural and logical progression for the RollerCoaster Tycoon franchise. It probably won't change the way you play the game, but it will give you plenty of new ways to keep the peeps entertained. We'll bring you more details about this expansion before it ships this fall.