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So I booted up the game. I was quite thrilled to see that the main menu had a loading screen despite not being animated. The main menu is well organized and has a nice marching band kind of theme. The game carries on the new trending of offering different glaringly obvious of advice. The menu screen and the game overall has a very "SimCity" or "Maxis" feel to it is that makes sense.
------Winding Wilds-----
I decided to have my go at the game in the first scenario titled "Winding Wilds". The goal of the scenario is to make a successful park even more successful for the investors. It's good to see that the game is incorporating the crippling satanism that comes with a business degree for added realism. An overview is shown below.
Paths:
In overview, the pathing system is quite nice. Circular and angled paths are allowed, which helps to break free from the fierce gridline structure the past RCT games had. There are many different path types, all of which are detailed. There are large paths, medium paths, and small paths. Large paths can be treated as 3 across, medium as 2 across, and small as what we're used to. All three are shown in the overview picture above. One interesting feature the game has the option of adding plazas, which are fat squares of paths with benches and various other objects within them. One thing I will note is that stalls are no longer "attached" to paths on the side like a magnet, you must always make a path to the stall. Another thing to note is that benches, lamps, and trash cans are usually placed OFF the path to the side now instead of on it. These offset objects and a plaza are shown in the image below where I butchered paint and PrtSc.
I haven't played the game enough to notice any horrendous pathfinding AI issues, but I'll edit this later if I have to. I have faith this won't be an issues.
Path construction is eerily similar to SimCity 5, where you click a spot and then a linear or curved path is plopped. One difference is that you can no longer right click to delete something, you must head down to the bulldozer to delete objects. The games does however highlight the object to be deleted in red, so I will give it credit for not allowing me to accidentally delete an object. Paths automatically gradually rise and add railings if topography is present. I decided to use the curved path tool to make a path along the river and connect sections of the park on a diagonal. The process to build a path is shown below.
You click the path type, click the origin, and then if you want a curved path you click where the white nub thing is first, and then the path bends as you drag the cursor. You can flub the path a bit if you're picky, but overall it works well and it's not too frustrating. To delete a tree, you simply select the bulldozer and the path window will stay open, delete the tree, and then carry on. Objects are not automatically deleted like in RCT2.
Flat Rides:
I decided to plop down some thrill rides since the park is missing these aside from a Larson Loop. I built an IntaShit drop tower, which has a preselected height (would be nice if this was customizable) and then was congratulated on "building your first Thrill ride". Thanks game. I'm glad adding a ride is a major accomplishment. I'll be able to get a journalism degree at this rate in no time.
The ride selection menu includes a nice picture of each ride and it was easily navigated. I was able to rotate the ride to fit between my path and the river easily. I had to cancel building to delete some scenery because right clicking was taken away, but aside from that it was painless.
The entrance and exit are clearly marked, as well as a very obvious "hey idiot no path is connected" style-warning. Each flat ride includes an operator booth that may or may not be located near the ride. The booth includes an employee who is either a white brunette, Jamaican immigrant worker guy who looks like his soul is being crushed by the racists of the Midwest in true Cedar Fair fashion, white blonde, or a white guy. They random put one hand in the air and otherwise don't do much. I hope that one day a game will be able to capture the obligatory "my first day off in 13 days was on a tuesday so I got totally hammered last night and I'm working entrance with massive sunglasses to hide my hangover" employee, however that is a distant dream. A smiling brunette is pictured below. She must be new and not realize she'll clean the queue more than she runs the ride because it's an IntaShit. I build a little queue and exit for the ride. Then I realized I should set the inspection times to ten minutes for each ride so I'm not paying the mechanics to sit on their ass all day so I did that. I named the ride "Butt Slammer 9000" and noticed they forgot to include a blinking cursor to let the user know that "Drop Zone 1" was able to be changed. The typical, excitement, intensity, and nausea ratings remain from previous games, but a new one called "safety" was added. We'll see how the Intashit progresses through time in that department. I was assuming safety was another way of displaying the reliability, but that's a separate statistic.
Staff:
In this game you build staff booths for each type, and then hire x number of that type until the booth is full. I like this system more as it's slightly more realistic, and creates fun "hide the staff building" (or don't lol) opportunities. I decided to build a mechanics booth next to the IntaShit, so they at least don't need to walk far. The large booth I picked can hold up to ten mechanics. Notice that you can't magnetically attach stalls to the path from earlier. The game includes a medic staff as a new feature, however I don't see why they're needed as the game has no fat midwesterners that "don't like water" and then wonder why they pass out after exerting more physical force in the 2 hours they've spent lumbering around the park in the sun than they've spent all of the previous calendar year. It would be cute to see new employees as they called 911 to progress from actually caring about the park guest that passes out in line to within 2 hours going "yeah some dumbass didn't drink water again and he'll be hard to lift bye". I have no idea what the medical staff does yet since all of my construction has been while the game is paused. The mechanic building window and hiring system is shown below:
I added some scenery to the area. It was nice when I added a path arch that it automatically snapped perpendicular to the path. The scenery hitboxes are also very forgiving, and everything was easily found and rotated properly. This menu is organized well. Another thing to note is that each flat has a radius where scenery is "effective" around it, this ring is automatically shown and it's a nice feature.
I then unpaused the game as I had run out of money to explore other options. The game warned me of this lack of money 9000 times.
I am currently trying to figure out how to get a janitor over to an area that looks like a drug overdose occurred. Vomit errywhar! No idea how to do this. I've tried clicking on the janitor booth to no avail, and clicking on a janitor does nothing. Hopefully this is addressed son.
While dicking around I've discovered the "Heat Menu", which displays the concentration of themes, and the concentration of cash flow. It's again very SimCity 5-like in presentation (but it functions). I assumed before I looked at the scale that the colors meant the opposite of what they do but that's okay. Picture of this below. It looks very useful.
Wooden Coaster 4 on the right appears to be my most profitable attraction. It is a continous curving, rising and falling, even oppositely-banked at times chainlift. Seriously. I'll make a separate post on the roller coasters later because.....just wow.
Edit: In the middle of building a coaster a pop-up came up saying I finished the objectives, and then I quit to the main menu without it asking me to save. Thanks for repeating the same ass feature from RCT3 before the expansions fixed it. Enough of this for now. I'll comment on the coaster building later.
Coaster Building:
I think the image below sums it up quite well. I don't know where to begin on this and it'll take me awhile to update this:
And now I broke the game trying to finish my roller coaster. The move tool allowed me to move the whole thing out of bounds aside from the station and it won't finish lol. Game is definitely in alpha still :/
