➤ Broken mountains 🎮

The genesis of RollerCoaster Tycoon World is not difficult to imagine. Atari's new management looks at the intellectual properties in their hands and selects the best-selling ones to reboot. One of these can only be a RollerCoaster Tycoon, since we are talking about a series that has sold not hundreds of thousands, but millions of copies. Who to entrust it to?

Frontier, the developer of RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, is out of the question, as he is working on a direct competitor: Planet Coaster. Chris Sawyer Productions, the team that made the first two chapters, is not even worth considering, as it no longer exists. It was therefore decided to turn to an unknown and inexperienced team, Nvizzio Creations, which it takes a lot of good will, but evidently does not have the means and the knowledge to carry out such a project. When RollerCoaster Tycoon World is released in the Early Access section of Steam it is March 30, 2016, coincidentally a few days after the launch of the Alpha version of Planet Coaster. Even then, the confrontation is merciless, despite the fact that even the title of Frontier is largely incomplete. RollerCoaster World has a greater focus on career mode, but it is plagued by a disproportionate amount of bugs, some very serious and, above all, has a decidedly inferior editor. The parallel we are making between the two games is not secondary to understand why the Atari title is a complete disaster. The months pass, Frontier proves to be a serious and capable developer (not for nothing has a name like that of the veteran David Braben behind it) and, after the arrival on Steam and numerous updates that have gradually added game pieces, the release date: Planet Coaster will be available starting November 17, 2016. In the meantime, RollerCoaster Tycoon World has been somewhat lost track. it too has been updated several times, but never in such a way as to resolve its critical issues. Moreover, Atari has greatly reduced communication by making it disappear from the radar. So imagine the surprise when the release date was suddenly announced: November 16, 2016. Yes, one day before Planet Coaster.

We have reviewed RollerCoaster Tycoon World. Unfortunately. What will have destroyed us inside?

The Chaser

Did Atari really think he could steal the public from the title of Frontier with such a sad trick? Probably yes, which gives a lot of insight into how projects are carried out there. In short, the historic brand RollerCoaster Tycoon found itself chasing a new intellectual property, Planet Coaster, trying to exploit its wake several times.

Do you think this is ridiculous? You probably haven't started the game. RollerCoaster Tycoon World is plagued by all sorts of problems and it is clear that this is an incomplete title. The first dramas occur with the tutorial, in which you seriously risk getting stuck or not seeing your progress recorded due to bugs. At least for the introductory missions, which should serve to explain the game mechanics, could it not be possible to put infinite resources? The problem is above all how it is structured: invasive pop-up windows ask us to do some things and we must find out how. But isn't it a tutorial? No explanation of the interface, not even a hint of what some choices entail. Nothing at all. Moreover, the game is translated very badly into Spanish, to the point that the tutorial texts ask us to use some functions by calling them in a certain way, when in reality the translation of the function in the interface is another. Some texts are not even translated, so to speak. Once you have overcome the obstacle, you can continue with the campaign, consisting of thirty missions, including tutorials, to be tackled sequentially. Every ten missions you change geographical area: you start in a wooded area, then you pass in a desert area and finally you find yourself on an island. The missions all have goals to accomplish, such as building some attractions, earning money, or satisfying a personality visiting the park for positive publicity. When you have finished, you abandon what you have done and take on the next mission. The solution of continuity between the various missions is minimal and, even if overall there is more care than in the career mode of Planet Coaster, the result is not exceptional. The real problems of the game, however, are others and mainly concern the simulation of the park and the editor.

Paranormal activities

We leave the campaign and start the sandbox mode (note that there are no other modes). which allows you to freely build a park, albeit with limited resources. We build some roads, buy the first attractions, get staffed and open up to the public.

Things seem to be going well, at least economically, but there is something wrong: the park is small and, despite the presence of three cleaners and bins everywhere, it is very dirty. The streets are filled with litter and vomit. We hire more staff and build more baskets. There is also a lot of dissatisfaction in the air. We click on one of the visitors. The guy is unhappy: he's hungry and has to go to the bathroom. Well, but he is right in front of a bathroom, which he dodges. So get on with it ... Calm and cool. The minutes pass, the new caretakers help in cleaning the park, which however remains dirty. As the park grows, the situation deteriorates and we understand that there is a need for a lot of staff for maintenance and emergency management. The problem is that staff can only be hired by constructing specific buildings, but each building gives access to a maximum of three employees! With the expansion of the park, to have the right number of workers, literally dozens of houses have to be built, but the problems are never completely solved. In conclusion, managing a park of RollerCoaster Tycoon World you will witness some strange paranormal phenomena related to visitors and staff and you will never fully understand if you are doing right or wrong. The only certain indicator is the economic one: if profits increase, then everything is going well, even if your roads are dirty, otherwise not.

And the editor?

If so much misery still isn't enough, then hold on tight because it's time for the editor. The comparison with Planet Coaster is merciless: the title of Frontier allows you to create what you want, RollerCoaster Tycoon World does not. The editor has major limitations, it doesn't have the same level of customization, and it has an interface that burdens the work instead of favoring it. Do we want to use objects that are at the bottom of one of the building categories? Know that there are no shortcuts or filters and you always have to scroll through the list to get there.

Convenient, right? We guarantee you that it is the minimum: much more serious is that there are problems joining the roads, to the point that if you do not want to have a headache it is better to do them all straight, also by virtue of the positioning of attractions and buildings, which can be problematic if you have created a network that is too complex. All the automations seen in Planet Coaster here are a mirage. The roller coaster editor itself offers complications that hinder the creation of tracks enormously. You can do something good with practice, as some downloadable online attractions show, but you always feel crippled. Let's take an example: we used terraforming to pull up a hill and pass a road through, so we tried to build street lamps, but we found that we couldn't do it the way we wanted and that in some places we couldn't position them. The reason was not understood and we were not told, the fact is that we could not achieve what we wanted and we had to fall back on an alternative project, that is, we quit the game and started Planet Coaster. The overall picture, already tragic in its own right, gets worse when we consider the high number of bugs, with frequent returns to the desktop, the absence of some attractions promised in Early Access, such as transport in the park, and a mediocre graphic side, which does not compare with the title of Frontier: the attractions are less realistic, both in the details than in the composition; visitors have less animation and are more stylized, decorative elements are softer and the lighting system is more basic, with a less convincing day / night cycle and poorly defined shadows. Let's also assume that the image appears too blurry, especially when you zoom in to widen the view of the park, and that the fluidity is not flawless, even when you exceed sixty frames per second. In short, did you understand that you have to avoid it?

PC System Requirements

Test Setup

Intel Core i7-4770 processor
16 GB of RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 video card
Windows 10 operating system

Minimum requirements

Windows 7 operating system (64-bit)
Intel 2.3 Ghz Core i5 or AMD equivalent processor
4 GB of RAM
GeForce GTX 460 or equivalent AMD video card
DirectX 11
10 GB of hard disk space

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We have little to add to what is expressed in the body of the article: RollerCoaster Tycoon World is a half disaster. Maybe with a few more months of development many problems could be solved, in the meantime, however, there is a lack of content and it is difficult to find positive sides in those that exist. To say, RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 dates back to the middle of the last decade, but it's vastly better. Forget it, really.