Somewhere between baseball and apple pie, you’ll find theme parks on a short list of America’s pastimes. It’s tough to remember a summer growing up that I didn’t find myself waiting in line for 2 hours to ride the next big roller coaster at Six Flags in Arlington. It’s the closest we get to playing tricks on gravity while still being on the ground, and Planet Coaster: Console Edition on the Xbox One, by developer and publisher Frontier Developments, lets you build the rides and parks of your dreams.
There are a few different ways to start your career as a park manager with Planet Coaster: Console Edition offering a traditional career mode where you fulfill challenges to progress through your career, challenge modes where you work to achieve park objectives on a limited budget, and a sandbox where you can build parks where the only limit is your imagination.
In career, there are 9 different missions to choose from with varying levels of difficulty. Each of these represents a unique theme park that you will help build into something that your customers love while keeping in mind the need to turn a profit. At the conclusion of each mission, you receive a star rating that measures how well you achieved each of the objectives and determines the XP you get to level up in the game. However, your level in the game doesn’t do much besides unlocking more difficult campaign missions.
The building mechanics of putting together a theme park are simply amazing in Planet Coaster: Console Edition. This game gives the player the opportunity to build the theme park of your dreams. You can do this in two ways, using pre–made blueprints that are tested to achieve certain levels of happiness and safety or you can engineer your own roller coasters to offer a unique experience to keep your park guests flooding through the gates.
Any time you build a ride whether it’s custom or a blueprint, you have to be sure to construct entrances and exits and build the rides over flat terrain to add a level of realism to the planning you need to do when assembling your park. You even have to test the ride to ensure your park guests enjoy it and experience a bearable level of nausea before you can open it to the public. I never could master building my own coaster, but I’m sure a talented gamer could build something crazy with the tools in this game that makes for some great in game footage.
In addition to the rides themselves, you also add scenery to your park, which helps with guest satisfaction and necessary facilities like food courts, bathrooms, and staff buildings to round out your park and keep it running smoothly.
In this really interesting game, the biggest issue I had was that the tutorial fell well short of what’s needed to explain a game with as much intricacy and nuance as this one has. You have to manage your park staff, customer happiness, evaluate what the customers need, and turn a profit well enough to keep your CFO happy, while you continue to innovate and build amazing rides.
It also seemed like the controls didn’t really suite the Xbox controller well. Usually it’s hard to tell if a game was a PC exclusive before, but you can with this one.
Overall, I really enjoyed my time playing this game and the whimsical nature of the characters and the things that you can do really made me feel like a kid cracking open a new game. However, this is a game that’s best played with a serious time commitment where you can unlock and master the most unique parts of Planet Coaster: Console Edition.
7/10
Check Out the Planet Coaster: Console Edition Trailer:
For more information, please visit: https://planetcoaster.com/
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Xbox One Review
My first console was the original Playstation and I would play Twisted Metal every now and then but games didn't hook me until I played the original Halo at my friend's house. As soon as I picked up that controller, I knew I needed an Xbox and I had to have that game. Since those early Halo days, I've branched out and played any game I could find with a great story and memorable characters but Master Chief is still my favorite. @thenotoriousTGT on Twitter
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