In the two years since launch, Frontier has managed to put out a paltry six tutorial videos, and its early-game “easy” scenarios almost complete themselves once a player has plopped down a coaster or two to top up their finances. For me, this was a fumbling process, largely because Planet Coaster doesn’t do a great job of teaching its players exactly how they can succeed. The newest of these scenarios is Gulpee’s Island Paradise, which tweaks the format of its forebears slightly, asking players to keep their staff happy as well as their guests. I ended up defaulting to the prefab constructions provided in these packs in Planet Coaster’s career mode, using them to draw in more guests and up the prestige of my park on my way to completing certain tasks specified by set scenarios.
#PLANET COASTER UPDATE FREE#
Additional free updates have focused on seasons, bringing go-karts in spring, fireworks in summer, and a scenario editor as part of its first anniversary celebrations. There are two of these official add-ons at the moment, both available for £8: an Adventure-themed selection that offers snapping crocodile props and other Indiana Jones-ish elements, and a Halloween-y Spooky pack that lets players build up ghost trains and the like. (As a sidenote, this raises the possibility that Planet Coaster players are managing some form of afterlife for their guests: a slice of existence where death is meaningless and rollercoasters are everything.)Īpparently more exciting to my heavenly riders are Planet Coaster’s pre-built coasters, a selection included in the base game and topped up by new additions in its major DLC packs. I can open it anyway, though, without fearing an eventual coroner visit and regulatory shutdown because, unlike the Rollercoaster Tycoon games, Planet Coaster’s human riders can’t die - though it hasn’t stopped a selection of players from Googling to check. In my case, I discovered that people actually wouldn’t be too keen on being G-forced to death: while the Hate Coaster’s fear and nausea ratings are off the scale, it’s not actually a particularly exciting ride. It’s health and safety gone mad, obviously, but it’s also a useful way to gauge whether guests will actually enjoy the monstrosity you’ve created, as the tests spit out values for excitement, fear, and nausea that help determine a ride’s popularity and the amount you can charge for tickets. Before players can open rides in Planet Coaster’s parks, they have to test them, putting a gaggle of white plastic crash test dummies through an ordeal to make sure flesh-and-blood humans won’t get turned inside out along the way. My first riders don’t die, though, because they’re not human. I have, I realise after connecting up the final piece of track, inadvertently built a version of the theoretical Euthanasia Coaster - the attraction designed specifically to kill its riders. With the infinite money open to me in Planet Coaster’s sandbox mode, I settle on a design: a slow climb to the top of a horrible mountain, before a sheer plunge down 20 storeys provides the speed to make it through five loop-the-loops, each sharply veering left, then right, then back again.
Frontier’s game - the spiritual successor to the glorious Rollercoaster Tycoon series - lets players construct their own coasters, noodling on every twist, turn, and terrifying drop to squeeze the most vomit out of its riders.
Planet Coaster is largely accommodating of these dark urges. I want to make something so fast, so rickety, and so nauseating that its riders feel as uneasy as I do when I think about the Red Hot Chili Peppers song Love Rollercoaster. Unlike the Red Hot Chili Peppers, though, I don’t want to make a Rollercoaster of Love. “Your love is like a rollercoaster baby, baby I wanna ride,” the Red Hot Chili Peppers famously sang on their awful song Love Rollercoaster.
#PLANET COASTER UPDATE UPDATE#
Update Night is a fortnightly column in which Rich McCormick revisits games to find out whether they've been changed for better or worse.
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