RollerCoaster Tycoon Adventures

First of all, I am so grateful that this game exists. It's the only game besides Mario Kart that I've been able to get my wife to play, and I'm hoping it will act as a sort of gateway drug for her. I'm going to try to get her to play Civilization VI with me when the semester is over.

I had a great first hour with this game. As soon as we started our journey in adventure mode, a wave of nostalgia hit me like a ton of bricks. Not only was I playing RollerCoaster Tycoon, but it looked better than ever, and we had so many options of things to put in our park.

From rollercoasters and thrill rides, to bathrooms and janitors, and all the way to decorations and food stands, this game features a ton of fun things to unlock and strategically place in your park. It even has a new feature where you can see statistics on all your rides, like how much money they make, how satisfied people are with them, and how close they are to breaking. This makes managing your park just as fun and engaging as building it.

Its mobile game roots show through in the wait system; in order to unlock a new building, ride, or decoration, you have to research it and wait for the research to finish. However, I didn't mind this at all; the wait time is generally only a few minutes, and there's plenty of things to do while you wait. You can even straight up speed up time if you want to. I would normally forget about the research until it was done and then reminded that I had to start a new project. In that sense, the mobile roots were perfectly fine.

However, the other collateral effect of being based on the mobile version of the game was that several features were removed entirely. The two that come to mind are raising and lowering the ground and building queues. Those two features alone had a pretty serious impact on my fun level. Because of limitations like these, my engagement with my park started to wane after a while. Once I realized I could only customize it so much, my motivation to keep building was lost.

My wife, on the other hand, has continued to spend several hours working on the park, for which I am very grateful. Every once in a while she'll pick it up and start building new areas. She even learned how to customize her own rollercoaster (something I never got around to doing) and experimented with the different challenge levels. These other features do save it from getting too boring once your main park gets too big.

Overall, I still think it was a lot of fun, I just didn't have that longterm connection to it that I was hoping for.