Planet Coaster: Game Review & Cheat Code

A few weeks before the launch of the Planet Coaster closed alpha—a perk for those who bought the "Early Bird Edition" of the game—Frontier Developments' Jonny Watts is scolding his team. Rather than work on squashing bugs in the game's complex path-finding system, or making sure that the tiny details on flat (pre-made) rides were correct, they were making roller coasters and theme parks. Some of them had been at it for days, obsessively chipping away at their creations using tools like environmental deformation and coaster editing that wouldn't even be in the alpha.

"We still have jobs to do," he told them.

Deadlines or not, how better to show a game works than a group of people who can't stop playing it? At the very least, there was plenty to show on press day. There are wonderfully complex roller coasters that slide effortlessly through the sides of hills and across other rides, and parks with a slick pirate theme made up of carefully placed wooden barrels and caged skeletons. Most impressive is a coaster that twirls around a huge tree in the middle of a park, a product of careful track placement and the game's pre-production environmental deformation tools.

These are just a glimpse of what's possible in Planet Coaster. As a spiritual successor to the Frontier-developed RollerCoaster Tycoon 3—itself a sequel to ex-Frontier employee Chris Sawyer's RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, Planet Coaster is suitably deep; a hardcore strategy sim for those with a penchant for clowns over conflict. The aim is to build a theme park, placing down paths and shops and rides and giving visitors places to line up for them. Parks have to be entertaining, yet expertly designed to extract as much cash out of customers as possible.

Everything is based on the first principle that customers have a particular amount of money in their pockets, which they use to buy entrance to the park, burgers from food stalls, and riding rides. Planet Coaster doesn't approximate this. If there are 50 people in the park, then there are 50 people rendered on screen, each with their own wants and needs and cash supplies. Success is about intelligent design. Sure, you can plonk down a few rides and a few paths and you might make a few quid. But placing the best rides at the back of the park to lead guests past gift shops, or placing toilets near a overly quiet ride can give it a boost: these are the expert techniques that turn a Blackpool Pleasure Beach into a Walt Disney World resort.

This is the sort of thing that gets Watts up in the morning. Despite spending nearly every day making a game about roller coasters and theme parks, Watts is a self-confessed theme park addict; a super-fan that has taken his family on a tour of nearly every major theme park in the world. "My kids love me," he says, before waxing lyrical about his two favourite roller coasters in the world: the Grand National at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, a wooden mobius strip roller coaster built in 1935, and Shambhala: Expedición al Himalaya, a "hyper coaster" in Spain's PortAventura park that sports a 78-metre drop, and speeds of up to 83mph. Watts even keeps a picture of the coaster as the background on his iPhone.

"I love the coasters," says Watts. "But I also like the theming and the layouts, because we're making a coaster game. I actually don't like the fast passes because I'll stand in the queue so I can't just look at all the theming and figure out where things are placed.

"When we did Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, we worked with a guy called John Wardley who built [Alton Towers'] Nemesis and Oblivion. One of the things he taught me was that whenever people queued up, he'd always make sure the queue was near where people got on the coaster, so they could learn how to put the harnesses on. That meant he got a 10 percent throughput increase, which resulted in millions of extra pounds. That's the sort of 'nerdicity' I'm challenging our designers to put into the game."

And challenged they are. With each visitor to the park needing to be rendered on-screen, and given some form of AI to lead them around paths and in and out of rides, the development team created an extremely sophisticated path-finding algorithm in order to stop the park from descending into chaos.

Visitors all have unique tastes too, some preferring the gentle rise of a ferris wheel, while others want to experience the mind-numbing thrills of a proper roller coaster. Even how you decorate the park, and what themes you use—so far just "Pirate" and "Planet Coaster" themes have been announced, but more are promised—affects the happiness of visitors.

Worse for Frontier is that there are curves. Lots of curves. Creating a path-finding algorithm on a grid is already complex, but players can create curves at near any angle they like, simply by dragging a slider control. Paths can go up and down too, allowing for theme parks to be constructed like shopping malls across multiple levels. There are no pre-built buildings either—flat rides and their entrances and exits excluded—with a powerful yet simple building tool allowing players to create buildings piece-by-piece, adding facilities and other paraphernalia like lights and signs to encourage visitors toward certain rides.

There are the other aspects of the park to manage, like the staff that need training and paying and being given the right shifts to avoid being overworked. Or the rides that need to be placed in just the right places, and priced at just the right level in order to attract customers. And yet, despite all this depth, Planet Coaster is pleasingly accessible. Despite having not played a theme park simulation game since 2002's RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, I picked up Planet Coaster with ease. Paths are laid down with a simple click, and dragged out to make them longer. Misplaced items are erased with a right click. Buildings are just as easy to construct.

After just a few minutes building I'd made a passable theme park, complete with a few rides, a concession stand, and some conveniently placed toilets. I even constructed a wall with a bright neon sign pointing towards my freshly built "Star Wheel" ride.

Planet Coaster is surprisingly accomplished for an alpha, then, although there are a few cracks beneath the surface. The menus for park items are indistinct and difficult to navigate, and you can't resize vanity items like signs to better fit a wall you've constructed. And, while there are ride and cinematic cameras that allow you to see how much guests are enjoying themselves, there isn't a way to follow guests around the park. A third-person view is coming, but first-person isn't currently planned.

Most disappointing, however, is that custom roller coasters aren't in the alpha—or at least they weren't when I played it. Arguably the best part of RollerCoaster Tycoon was building obscene roller coasters and seeing how many Gs you could subject guests to before they threw up the $10 burger they'd bought just a few moments earlier.

At the time, Watts told me that the coaster editor wasn't in the alpha, because the UI wasn't finished, and that he'd prefer feedback on things that he knew weren't totally broken. And yet, it turns out that people at home will be able to at least try to build some roller coasters, apparently due to "community feedback." All they have to do is enter an old school cheat code:

(To access coaster building, open a map and select the "Rides," "Scenery," or "Buildings" tab, then select the "Search" option (a magnifying glass) and enter the code "underconstruction" (all one word) to enable the coaster construction tab.)

Despite the lack of roller coasters, like the dev team before me, I found myself not wanting to leave Planet Coaster. It takes just a few minutes of playing for that management instinct to kick in, that urge to subtly tweak and observe in order to reach perfection. People will build amazing things in things Planet Coaster, of that I'm sure—the tools are more than powerful enough. And for people like Watts, whose life revolves around the ups, downs, and sideways of a good theme park, Planet Coaster may just be the game that lets them run one of their own.

"I'm definitely a park nerd," says Watts. "I really appreciate the whole thing. I've met people that know coasters much more than I do, and I don't want disrespect them by putting myself on the same pedestal as them. But I'm really appreciative of their knowledge and their skills and I want to learn from them. I want them to see what we're doing because it's damned exciting. We are doing a best-in-class game. I'm absolutely convinced of that. RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 back in the day was pretty damn good. We're plussing it and we're doing it on our own ticket, and I'm just so proud."

The alpha of Planet Coaster is exclusively available to those who pre-ordered the "Early Bird Edition" of the game direct from Frontier. There's no word yet of a wider alpha or beta test. The full game is due out in Q4 2016.

This post originated on Ars Technica UK