Barry Wallace

At first I was quite enamored of this game. Having been a fan of the original Roller Coaster Tycoon, and having this game recommended to me. I took the plunge, and initially it was great fun. However, the more you do with this game, the more maddening it becomes. The scenarios and objectives that come with the game are absolutely unrealistic. Days go by in a matter of minutes, but your original guests never leave the park. This makes it impossible to create a park with an admission price and all rides free, because there is no daily flow of guests. Forget the fact that individual rides require ridiculously high pay-per-ride costs for guests. Vendors and employees are both lazy and become disgruntled at a rate that is utterly beyond belief by any realistic standard. You spend half your time (or more) rehiring staff who quit and firing staff who spend all day anyplace but their assigned shop. I've worked in the amusement park industry. And oh what fun it is to spend hours upon hours in the process of building a lovely park, only to have the game decide not to even let guests into the park. If all you want to do is build some roller coasters, this is your game. In that respect it's a vast improvement on RCT. But ultimately, if you wish to create any kind of realistic virtual amusement park, this game is simply a much more complex and graphically advanced arcade game ala Space Invaders, in that it seems designed to ensure frustration and failure. I doubt any real life amusement park could survive if it had to play by this game's logarithms.