Rollercoaster World
PlayStation 2 version
Horrible excuse for a roller coaster simulation game.
The Good
This is one of very few roller coaster/amusement park games, and the roller coaster designer screen was pretty interesting, featuring the 4 window system people who have used 3D modeling programs are familiar with. Designing an roller coaster isn't very hard, and when you do test runs you get statistics presented in a pretty funny way popping up, like "10 people are feeling ill, 1 is missing" and the amount of G forces the people in the ride are experiencing.
But that's about it.
The Bad
Well, there isn't anything more to do in the game, you can build and research some other stuff, but none of it is interesting, and is presented with horrible graphics. The graphics looks like they are from a cheap and early Playstation 1 game, amusement park visitors are displayed as ugly, low res static sprites, you don't see any people walking around in your park, they are just standing there. While the roller coaster design was pretty easy and featured a pretty good tutorial nothing else in the game is described - you have no idea of what use you have for a building, and there are some strange things you can build - why, for example, would you like to build a couple of office skyscrapers in the middle of your amusement park? What do they do?
It's too easy to earn money in the game, unless you spend your money on placing a lot of useless skyscrapers it's almost impossible to lose the game.
Except for the amusement park, the choices in the main menu consists of "riding" roller coasters that were included in the game (which you can not use in your park by the way, nor would you want to, since the designers obviously didn't think of letting anyone survive the ride - the statistics show lots of people falling of during those pre-designed rides), which might be fun for about 1 minute - but then you start to wonder - was this the whole game? In about 15 minutes you have done everything that you can do in the game, and it becomes really, really boring.
There is no AI, no competition and nothing to do.
The Bottom Line
This is a game you should stay away from at all costs, while it has a good roller coaster design program it does not containing anything else whatsoever. The time it takes to do everything you can do in this game can be counted in minutes - that's right, there's not even an hours worth of gameplay here. This is the kind of game you could expect to get as a freebie in your Corn Flakes box, but it is absolutely NOT worth the 5-10 euro they want for the game in the stores. The game feels like it was part of a bigger game intended to be released on the first Playstation console, but the Playstation 2 came out before they were done with it, and they decided to release it in it's early stage for the PS2 after some minor graphics adjustments without actually finishing any other parts than the 3D roller coaster designer.
by Joel Segerbäck (641) on August 31, 2008