Roller Coaster Mania

The Good
The game has been designed to be simple to use. The tracks are colourful and simple layouts can be constructed easily. Though it gets harder as more ambitious the layout design s are attempted the areas of terrain that are available seem vast. I spent a long time constructing a layout and I didn't come close to filling the available space.

The music is good, listenable and suits the game well, it's nothing that I would want to listen to on my ipod but it's good enough and when playing this game I didn't turn it off.

The Bad
This looks like a very simple game. There are only a few big brightly coloured controls, when building the game only offers the player track they can actually use, but all of this is deceptive.
Yes, simple layouts can be constructed and tested within five to ten minutes but problems arise with anything that is complex and asymmetrical. It is immensely frustrating to spend a lot of time constructing a layout only to find that when you come to complete it the track ends don't line up. What do you do then? There is no 'auto-connect' option to bridge the gap, all the player can do is to keep deleting pieces of track and trying, and re-trying, to rebuild the last section until it reaches the station house in line with the existing track.

So you build a simple track, it looks OK and you test it, and there's a problem, on my circuit the carriage could not travel up the gradient part way around the course, how do you fix it? Well that's not so easy either. The game only allows track to be added at the 'active end'. Sections in the middle of the track cannot be deleted and replaced so the only way to modify a track is to start deleting track from the end right back to the point where an extra curve, or in my case where another powered section was needed, change the track, and then rebuild it.

Another irritating feature of track building is the game only offering the track sections that the player can use next. This also becomes irritating very quickly, for example when making a curved section the player lays the first piece and then goes to the menu bar to select the same section again only to find that either it isn't there or it's position in the selection bar has changed.

Changing the player's point of view is also a bit tricky. There are three buttons over in the lower left of the screen, the player clicks on one to change their horizontal viewpoint and, when the mouse is moved the point of view moves in the horizontal plane. There are similar buttons that control rotation and vertical movement but each has to be done separately. While this is adequate it feels clumsy and unnecessarily complicated.

The Bottom Line
Easy to construct small layouts, much harder to design larger ones. The control system can be frustrating and actually hinders track building, which is the heart of the game, making it a a less than enjoyable experience.