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When I was younger, I spent a lot of hours on RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 & 2, and I recently invested in the third installment on the Nintendo Switch. However, I’ve been keenly watching PC gamers enjoy the spectacular looking Planet Coaster, a theme park business sim not too dissimilar from the RCT franchise.
Frontier Games were kind enough to send us a copy of the new Planet Coaster: Console Edition (Deluxe Edition) for the PlayStation 5. The online-exclusive deluxe edition may set you back almost £50, but it comes with the downloadable content Magnificient Rides Collection, Classic Rides Collection, and the Deluxe Rides Collection.
At first, the game is extremely daunting with many tools, attractions, shops, scenery pieces, buildings, challenges, and that doesn’t even include the business aspects of the game with its budgeting, ride reliability, staff management, and research unit. It does hit you all at once, but the career mode tutorials have been revamped specifically for the console edition, and they guide you through the controls with great ease. Once I had gotten the hang of things, I was able to create a decent enough theme park called “Adventure Islands” with a medieval-fantasy land, a tropical-pirate paradise, and an out-of-this-world sci-fi land.
My park was decent enough, but my biggest issue was building dark rides (rides that take place mostly or completely indoors) as they require constructing a building in which to house the rides. While many players online have fun building their stage buildings to house their attractions, I found it extremely cumbersome and wished that there was an option to install a pre-build building I could use instead of creating one from scratch.
Although, that’s just me because as I mentioned previously, many people online have a great deal of fun building their back-of-house buildings, and hiding this with intricately themed-scenery (see the image above as an example).
What I did love was creating themed lands. The filtering system is easy to use, and it makes it much easier to find rides and scenery to match the theme of your park or specific land. You can find everything from bins to animatronics to match your theme.
One of the bigger things players are going to be excited about is, of course, the rollercoasters. You can insert one of the many pre-built coasters or build your own, and building your own is incredibly easy and insanely fun — don’t get too carried away though because you will have to deal with the consequences of G-forces, fear, and excitement levels being too high and sometimes too low.
I had a far greater time building custom track rides that weren’t rollercoasters, such as the tracker system (a ride specifically created for those who love to create dark rides). Even though I wasn’t very good at creating the building to house it in, once I had built it I had so much fun filling in all of the gaps around the track and then working out where the queue should go, sectioning off the rooms. It’s extremely time-consuming, but once I was done, I felt proud that I actually managed to do it, and I felt even better when it became one of the most popular rides in the park.
If you’ve been following Planet Coaster, you’ll notice that the console edition is missing a good few DLCs including the Studios Pack and the Ghostbusters pack, but Frontier has confirmed that the DLCs are coming to consoles.
There aren’t that many setbacks in this console edition, and many of the PC elements have been carried over, and unfortunately, that includes a bug or two. I encountered two nuisance bugs, the first of which involved paths (a glitch I have since learned has been present on the original PC version of the game). I had to spend quite a bit of time working out why my staff and park guests were stopping in the middle of the paths; I tried deleting and rebuilding the paths only to find that the bug expanded to other areas of the park. In the end, re-loading the game worked, and I didn’t lose much.
Another bug is hidden within the Frontier Workshop, a wonderful online tool that allows players to upload their creations for others to download and enjoy, but the game completely crashed for me several times while trying to search for keywords. When the Frontier Workshop does work, it’s very straightforward to download creation and place them in your park (depending on whether the user has tagged them correctly). Since the game is still brand new to consoles, there isn’t much variety of player creations, this will obviously become more filled-in as time goes by, but it seems like a missed opportunity to include the years-worth of PC gamers’ content.
Another frustrating surprise is The Osward-Eugene Counter, which is just a fancy name for build limit, something that has been created for the console edition to avoid the game lagging due to the sheer amount of detail and features players can add to their parks. It’s not a complete hindrance, but once you reach the one-hundred percent mark, you can’t add a single item and are encouraged to remove anything you may not need. At the end of the day, it’s there to stop the game from freezing or lagging, but an option to remove the counter should have been included. PS5 and Xbox players should also know that they have been blessed with 30% extra capacity in The Oswald-Eugene Counter, so if you want to share your park with a friend who is playing on a last-gen console, then you must check the counter to see if you may need to remove anything first.
At first, Planet Coaster: Console Edition may be incredibly daunting, but once you have the grips of everything you’ll spend many hours creating your dream theme park. Frontier has also been great in including a next-gen upgrade, so if you purchase the game on a PlayStation 4 or Xbox One but later purchase a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X, you can download a next-gen update at no extra cost.
If you loved the RollerCoaster Tycoon games of old, or a just a theme park fan in general then Planet Coaster: Console Edition is definitely a game worth your time.
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