Rollercoaster Tycoon Deluxe (Steam version) Review

Wanna go for a ride? Cause here is a review for Rollercoaster Tycoon (RCT)! Attach your seatbelt and let me be your guide as we tour the park! Here, I’m reviewing RollerCoaster Tycoon: Deluxe Edition, the first episode of the series. It also comes with its respective gameplay extensions. The game was created and developed by Chris Sawyer and originally published by Hasbro Interactive (now Atari). It was released in March 1999 on PC. The title itself is obvious. You're going to play a tycoon game about an amusement park. It will all be about managing your resources, your attractions, the visitors and their happiness, etc. As you launch the game for the first time, the main menu appears. It’s a very simple and basic menu. You only get 4 buttons: New Game, Saved Games, Tutorial, and Quit. Better start with the tutorial then, so you can get the basis for how to manage your park (but hey, if your thing is to press the quit button already, I won’t judge). The tutorial is really simple and takes control of the game for the purpose of showing you how to proceed to realize the most basic tasks. It is really simple and short (~5 minutes), with no kind of text, and very self-explanatory. From my perspective, I would have preferred a longer one with more explanations, but the game overall shouldn’t be that hard to play anyway. So, now that it’s your time to shine! Let’s start a game for good and get a look at the available scenarios to play in the new game list. I must admit that the choice is rather varied, especially with the extra maps from the extensions.

The "New Game" screen lets you pick up your map of choice.

Each scenario has its own goal to achieve within a certain amount of time (generally, 3 years). The game lets you play in free mode after that, regardless of if you complete your objectives or not. If you’re like me and only care about the objectives, each map should last around 2 hours. Due to the time it takes attempting to complete each objective and the free time afterward, you can expect to spend a good amount of time on this game.
The goals vary from attracting a certain amount of visitors to getting a certain amount of money. They tend to get harder as you play the scenarios. The top of the list is the easiest, and as you go down, the game starts to resist your advances more and more. A bunch of them require you to complete the previous scenarios in order to unlock them.

So, have you finally made up your mind and picked up the one you’d like to play? Awesome! I’d advise you to take a first glance at your park. It will give you a first idea of what’s going on there, how the land is shaped, and if there are already some pre-built attractions or not.

Such a nice park!

RCT plays a bit like you would manage everything from a computer: you have a taskbar placed at the top of the screen, full of buttons that let you build various structures such as roads and trash cans, manage your staff, modify the land, etc. And the most important usage: building rollercoasters, of course! Each button opens a popup window with some actions to pick up. It’s not always clear how you can proceed to realize them. I had some trouble placing water, for example. And I still have a hard time with the land leveling tool. The game lets you spend extra money on things outside of the park itself. You can manage the allocation for the research lab, which will let you develop all sorts of new attractions and stands. An important area to spend your money on as well is marketing. You are able to spend a few bucks to buy ads, resulting in a more significant number of visitors. Money starting to become lacking? Worry not, as you also have the possibility to manage your loan and ask for more if you are in need (and no, don’t expect to cheat that way, the bank has its loan limit!).

About the rollercoasters, the game lets you pick up already-made ones or create your own. Each option has pros and cons. At first, I was very glad that you could buy already-made attractions; it’s such a faster and easier option, but they are, in fact, kind of hard to place because they don’t fit anywhere. Building them gives you so much freedom, but it’s really hard to master the tool and create something decent or good-looking. You won’t have much choice; however, since that way, you can make the ride fit quite everywhere. And that’s also the main interest of RCT, right? Building your desired park with the rides of your dreams, right?

Aside from the rides, RCT allows you to use all sorts of other classic attractions, such as the merry-go-round or the haunted house. You do get a bunch of stands as well, like food stands, drink stands, or even souvenir stands.

The game comes with a good share of funny little things here and there. First of all, after I decided to open an attraction to people without actually testing it, I realized that it was at my expense. You can actually kill people. I watched my first bunch of visitors fly up to the sky, only to land back in a bloodbath. What a horrific vision did I just get? It turns out you can also voluntarily kill them by dropping them into the water. I did try this with my own staff, and it works as well! A good way to manage a team, in my opinion.

I’ll just end up here saying that RCT felt quite unstable. For example, the game tends to crash when you want to go back on Windows. When doing so, it’s also rather hard to actually click on anything else on the screen. I had to press CTRL+ALT+TAB to force the mouse to be able to click on things.