I haven’t played a management sim in any depth for a long time, but given the chance to review Planet Coaster: Console Edition on my XSX got me curious. In doing a little research, this game was actually first released on PC in 2016, but this Console Edition is very aptly named given that Frontier put in a tremendous amount of effort to make the game not only run great on consoles, but also control great. Though you can use a mouse and keyboard to play, I don’t typically keep one near my consoles, so I decided to play this with just purely the Xbox controller. After playing through the tutorials, I was pleasantly surprised at how accessible and easy it was to not only use a controller, but manage my own theme park.
I appreciated that Planet Coaster presents the game in bite size chunks to start, and that, even after the tutorials and when you’re on your own, there is a lot of micromanagement stuff that is available to you but a lot of it turns out to not be critical to the experience. In other words, for those that want to manage it all, you can, but if you’re like me and aren’t that sim-focused, you won’t suffer much penalty for it.
Something else that made Planet Coaster a treat to get into were the NPCs that help explain some of the facets of the game, from theme park theory and operations to keep guests happy, to the financial components, to logistics such as ride placement and keeping things functioning and efficient. A fourth character helps give feedback about what’s working and what isn’t in your park, such as rides being disabled, prices being too high, and things like that. These characters have animated avatars, excellent voice-acting, and personalities that go a ways. I think these are actually unique to the Console Edition which is a nice touch.
So one the one hand, players are focusing on a theme park as a whole, with more than just roller coasters — but then of course there is a second, major component that is all about making the roller coasters of your dreams (or nightmares). Coasters are graded based upon factors: fear, excitement, and <gulp> how nausea-inducing they are for guests. The game is helpful to steer you in the right direction for these things so that you can find the right balance.
The game comes with plenty of resources, including hundreds of new ride and building blueprints that help you deploy new rides and get your park going rapidly. Online resources are also vast, allowing you to pull in assets from userland, and there is an incredible assortment of cool ideas, real park remakes, and other things for you to chew on (and share back to) should you so desire. For the scope of this review, I didn’t get into that, but I could see possibly doing that in the future.
On XSX, Planet Coaster looked and ran like a game that was built for the system. Vivid colors, smooth animations, and lots of visual pop to the imagery made the game feel right at home on next-gen. Theme parks you create here can be shared with other users on other consoles, but you have to be mindful of how many assets you try to push to those other system. A nice in-game mechanism will alert you if you’re pushing the memory and compute limit of the other systems, if you’re concerned about it.
Overall, a ticket to Plant Coaster: Console Edition is a great buy if you’re at all into theme park management. Frontier did a superb job bringing their excellent 2016 PC game to next-gen with console-friendly UI, controls, and everything you could need to get a big jump on your theme park building and management gameplay.
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