I played a ton of Rollercoaster Tycoon a long time ago. Spent hours building up my theme park, and hours of watching everyone vomit as they get off. Sure, I was a bit of a masochist by building rollercoasters that end abruptly and kill everyone on it, but who wasn’t? It was a fun series, and I was sad to see it fade away back around 2004. Now, it’s had its first foray into the handheld gaming world. Is it a failure, or will it be the best ride of your life?

Gameplay

Rollercoaster Tycoon’s gameplay isn’t complicated. Build up your theme park with a variety of rides and amenities, and manage manage manage. Somehow, someway, this 3DS version complicated things up.

The actual gameplay is like Rollercoaster Tycoon, more or less. Build a bunch of concessions and rides to get money and keep people happy. The problem is a lot of the rides and tools are missing, making it seem a bit empty. There are no water rides, and you can’t build pools. You can’t make stuff go underground and you can’t raise or lower the land in game. You can only choose one of four preapproved land types. Bumpy on the sides, bumpy in the middle, bumpy everywhere, or flat.

When building something in this game, you obviously can’t click and drag a mouse to make it. Their idea of a replacement, is to put down one square, and then click an arrow to where you want to extend it. Something as simple as making a sidewalk takes an awful long time. You click on your square where you want to start it, and then click the build left arrow to make it go left. However, if your camera isn’t positioned properly, the building arrow will keep going one grid to the top of the screen, even if you made a road to the left. So, you keep having to move the arrow to the left of the sidewalk again. I can understand this working for Rollercoasters, because that’s how you did it in the PC game, but for anything that has to be extended, it must be built this way.

Graphics

The worst thing in this game by FAR is the UI. The UI in this game is atrocious. Even when you’re not trying to navigate it, everything just looks cheap. Buttons use horrible gradients, and a lot of times the icons don’t make any sense. It’s horrible. When you do try to navigate it, you’re confused as to how anyone thought this was a good layout. Just an example of something really simple they messed up: When going through multiple pages of rides, you have to click right and left arrows, correct? Well, when you click the right arrow, EVERYTHING moves right, like swiping on an iPhone. It blew my mind to think that clicking the right arrow would take me to the left side. What happened?

The general look of the game isn’t that bad, though. Besides the UI, which looks nasty, the game itself has decent enough PopCap-looking graphics. There’s a few different lands to build your theme park on, including things like the moon. In game, you have a little arrow telling you what grid you’re currently looking at on the top screen, but there isn’t an arrow on the touch screen, so I got confused every now and then looking at the touch screen’s checkerboard pattern, not knowing where I’m at. The touchpad shows your construction from a grid view, and is pretty much useless, honestly. It would’ve been nice if you could skip around the map down there, but you can’t.

The camera is actually pretty awful. You have to click the d-pad to rotate it, and there is no fine control. You can only have it one of four ways. There’s also no way to zoom out to see all of your park, which I don’t understand.

Finally, Rollercoaster Tycoon doesn’t do much to make use of the 3D options on the system. You can have it on when zooming around your park, and you can use it when testing out your roller coasters but beyond that, there isn’t much use for it. Even the first person ride view thing isn’t all that great, and you’ll honestly use it only once or twice.

Conclusion

I didn’t go into this game with the highest of expectations. I went in knowing it would be bad, honestly, but not this bad. I can see Rollercoaster Tycoon working on the 3DS. It wouldn’t be that hard. This game wouldn’t suck as much if the UI were done better, and more options were added. As it stands, this game is awful. If you’re really looking to play a Rollercoaster Tycoon game, get the one in the Steam Store. Tons of more features, and better in every way. Avoid this.