This Week I Have Been Mostly Playing…
Parkitect on PC
The trudge through my ever expanding back catalogue continues. Time I delve back into Steam and see what I really needed to play. How about the game regarded as the natural successor to the brilliant Rollercoaster Tycoon 2? There have been several Theme Park style games in recent years but this seems to be the highest rated. Can it live up to my heady memories of the early 2000s? Kind of.
Great games will show you something new. Brilliant games tell you something about yourself. Parkitect tells me I am one of the least creative people around. Deep down I already knew it but it's far worse than I realised! The game premise is simple, you have some money, land and blueprints for park rides. Go build a successful theme park. So far, so similar. I had read that the addition of Hauliers, staff that transport goods around on Staff paths was a game changer. It wasn't but the covering up of these illusion breaking infrastructure was.
Aesthetics plays a huge part in this game. In other games you plonk down any old rides or shops and customers stay happy. Here things need to be themed, toilets just out of view and the back end parts completely hidden. Putting up some fences to hide a path is easy enough. Keeping the old west theme going is far far harder. For me anyway. I must have skipped a lesson at school for design flourishes.
This all ties in to customer satisfaction. If the punters love the look of the park they will spend more money. In my case they were tight as fuck. Barely made enough to complete the campaign levels. As usual this has so many sub menus that picking them apart can be tricky for beginners. This is definitely for those that put the time in. Among the useful stats were heat maps showing which areas of the part were most disliked. Fixing these areas was a must.
Even though I was having troubles there was a lot to like. This game looks amazing. Each park is stunning and I really like the character models. They look a bit toyish but that plays into the sandbox nature of the game. You can pick them up and throw them around! Playing the levels brings you to interesting locations, with the Tropical Island and Old West being my favourites so far. You are given pretty generous maps in the early game allowing players a lot of design freedom.
Missions have varied completion objectives, such as a set numbers of people in the Park or keeping satisfaction above a certain percentage. I was hitting the mark on most of these but scrambling around for cash. I dip to around $1000 and never seem to recover. People flock for new rides but grow bored of them after a while. It was something I never managed to solve and proves to be a bit of a blocker for future playthroughs.
Maybe I missed a trick as a kid as it seems the real reason to play these types of games is designing the most extreme roller coasters possible. As stated above you can guess that I never ever go beyond the set templates. I have no idea what people would like. There are some brilliant themed ones that can be unlocked through research. There's a huge steam workshop collection of designs for you to plunder as well. A ripe tool for all you creatives out there particularly if you just want to dip into sandbox mode and be untethered from money constraints.
As for me I should have seen the warning signs in past titles. It took a fourth Stardew Valley farm to have paths for walking and flowers for aesthetics. It had never gone through my mind to bother in making things beyond practical in 300 hours! Fuck knows how I managed to put 30 hours in Animal Crossing New Horizons, the ultimate asethics game. Parkitect is a very impressive game, one that if this is your kind of thing I would 100% recommend. It is very much the modern Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 with added bells and whistles. It just might take you a while to work out how to use them.
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