Welcome to our CHEATfactor Game Review of Planet Coaster. We review the game and then factor in how the available cheats affect the overall game experience. For better or worse, our reviews will help you decide whether or not to use cheats when playing the game.
Creating and running your own theme park has to rank up there with superhero and professional candy taste tester when it comes to dream job for many kids. Planet Coaster feels like the realization of those dreams, letting players use their imagination to create gut-wrenching thrill rides to their heart's content, but it also reminds them that there's a reality to the fantasy and asks players to micromanage everything from the paychecks of the janitor the speed of the tilt-a-whirl. It's far more successful at the former than the later, with it being at it's absolute best when encouraging players to think outside of the box. It's easily the best theme park sim to come along in years, even if it is far less successful at the whole sim part.
Your goal in Planet Coaster is simple, create the amusement park of your dreams, whatever that may be. Fans of past theme park builders like Rollercoaster Tycoon will feel right at home with Planet Coaster's basic premise, even if they are a little intimidated by the scope of that premise. No theme park builder and perhaps no building sim in general comes close to the creation options at play in Planet Coaster. Whether you're starting from scratch or one of the game's premade layouts, you'll never be without something to do in Frontier Development's coaster builder. That's a feature that keeps getting better too, as the game features fully backed community creation support and that community has not disappointed in the slightest. As of this writing the game's community page is filled with creations, whether they're completely unique creations or reproductions of some of the most famous theme park attractions in the world. With Planet Coaster, Frontier Developments encourage player creativity and it's incredibly refreshing.
There's nowhere that that's more clear than in the time where you're actually building things. I said earlier that the amount of stuff in Planet Coaster can be daunting, especially when you first launch the game but you'll soon figure out that Planet Coaster isn't here to scare you. It becomes pretty clear pretty quickly that Planet Coaster isn't concerned with forcing you to build the biggest park, or even the best one, it just wants you to build. Planet Coaster gives you a blank canvas and almost complete freedom to do what you wish with it. It different modes it'll give you feedback on what you're building but it never feels like it oversteps its bounds. Take the game's bread and butter for instance, it's coaster builder, which is perhaps that most intuitive building mechanic I've ever seen in a game. The game makes it incredibly easy to visualize a concept, start laying it out and then through a series of remarkably intuitive and useful tools complete your creation with ease.
While the game will step in and give you pointers of the "that's not physically possible" variety, Planet Coaster will rarely step in and actively try to stop you from doing something. Want to build an iron monstrosity of speed, filled with ten loops and more dips than you can count? Sit back and watch the people lose their lunch. Want to go back in time and create an old timey wooden coaster that's safe for everyone? Go for it. There's a bit of joy in the freedom that planet coaster gives you, especially since the game is so user friendly that it's incredibly possible to get lost building here for hours.
For everything that Planet Coaster does right, it lacks in the management section. The features are there but it almost feels like the developers just thought they needed to have them in and as a result they're little more than an afterthought but unfortunately they start to show cracks in Planet Coaster's foundation. The small decisions have little to no effect on your park and are the opposite of being as intuitive as the rest of the game. Want to just adjust the pay of that one janitor who seems to be working his butt off? Too bad, you'll have to adjust all of them. It's not likely going to be an issue though as the game uses the same model for all of its different positions so every mechanic looks like the next one, same with the janitors. That's extremely disappointing because the game seems to go to great lengths to make your park patrons seem, act and look different.
As a theme park builder Planet Coaster is untouched and will continue to be that way thanks to a remarkably dedicated community that keeps creating new content but as a business sim, it's far less successful. There's a lot of fun to be had in Planet Coaster, especially if you're able to let your imagination run wild, now if you'll excuse me, I've got a group of theme park goers to make puke.
