Gameplay

If you build it, they won't come

Build a walkway, throw down a ride, build the line, toss a few concession stands and bathroom, and you're a theme park mogul. You have a lot of attractions to choose from. The Sub Zero ride is a giant frozen scarecrow that whirls riders along on his hands. The Rocking Rocket is rocket-themed wooden roller coaster. The Grab-A-Prize is a giant version of those annoying claw machines at Denny's. If you look carefully however, you'll find that "dozens" of attractions are really the same ride with a different theme. A log ride is a log ride, no matter what it looks like.

That's actually a bathroom

Riding the King coaster

Of course the biggest draw to SimCoaster is the ability to design and ride your own roller coasters. It's a neat feature, but SimCoaster fails in its delivery. After you place the station and the lines, you place supports for the track. One of the problems is that you can't undo a support until you've finished the entire track. Once I placed a support so that the track would connect back to the station. Unfortunately it was at the wrong angle to connect to the station (it doesn't warn you of bad angles). The only way I could finish the track was to build seven extra supports to loop back around to the station. The worst part is that as soon as you "complete" the track, the game takes the money away. So if you make any mistakes in your track design, you lose the money.

You can choose pre-built roller coasters if you don't want to go through the hassle of designing your own. The problem is that the pre-built coasters are too large. You'll be very lucky if you can find the space to put down a pre-built coaster, especially in the early stages of a park, when all of the land hasn't been opened.

A food court inside a log ride

It's a hanging coaster

Clean up in aisle 7

The park doesn't run by itself; you need to hire employees to maintain the park. Engineers fix and upgrade rides, janitors clean up, and entertainers keep the visitors… entertained. You can either set a patrol area for each employee, or you can let him walk around aimlessly. Setting a patrol area is your best bet, but it has a big problem. If you have five gardeners and five patrol areas, the only way to tell which patrol area is assigned to which gardener is to click on each gardener and view their patrol area. This is a pain since employees don't stay in their patrol area all of the time.

Work them harder!

Meet Joe, the giant lightbulb

Play nice with the kiddies

Objectives work well in SimCoaster -- they give you something to work for. A common objective is opening a new section of land within one of the themes. You accomplish this by researching a solution (drain the swamp, blow up the rocks), training employees in the tasks, and finally spending golden tickets to open the new section of the park. So instead of sitting around and watching kids puke, you can work towards a goal. Good call on Bullfrog's part.

Challenges, on the other hand, don't work as well as objectives. For example, one challenge sees if you can keep all of your employees above 30% happiness for 30 days. Too keep an employee happy you need to make sure he's paid well, and he has plenty of breaks. The problem is the employees are dumb. They won't take breaks if the staff room is too far away, but there's no documentation on how far is too far. So what you have to do is click through your employee lists (there's no way to display all of your employees in one list…), see which ones are low on happiness, then pick them up and drop them in the break room. One at a time. And you can't keep the list open while you move an employee. It's annoying, and unfortunately all of the challenges are like this - exercises in finding out how annoying SimCoaster's interface is.