Updating my review after getting 100% Achievements in this game:

Career mode's story is... cute I guess? I would've liked if there were some non-linear elements. Give me a list of goals and tell me to complete three. With the current bugs, it lead to a lot of gaming the game to get the goals instead of naturally playing the game.

Most achievements are acquired from Career. Everything is pretty straightforward, except for sometimes you get it for bronze, sometimes for gold. That really doesn't matter because the "get 72 metals" means you're going to platinum on every map anyway. Worst career objectives: get satisfied thurst and hunger to x percent. I had to close/open the parks to game this by bringing in people that were already satisfied. I put down no less than 100 drink stalls to guide the horse to water, but I couldn't make him drink...

Hotfix 2 would've helped a lot. As it stands I still have guests that will go to the pool as soon as the park is opened, but then no new guests will ever go there. Hope they keep working on it.

I still would not recommend this game to anyone that is not a big fan of similar games. We had a lot of growing pains in PC1 that should've lead to fixes pre-launch, but it seems they forgot those lessons.


ORIGINAL REVIEW AT DAY OF RELEASE FOLLOWS:

If you aren't dying to play this game right now, honestly don't buy it. Lots of half baked features, regressions in available scenery... The UI is just bad, feels like 5 more clicks to do anything. There are improvements to be sure, but there are annoyances everywhere that make it feel like the devs were rushed. PC1 was the 'FU' to the Roller Coaster Tycoon franchise by a dev team that cared about what they were making... this feels like those devs were putting in the same detail and got kneecapped by the company.

Coaster Builder no longer allows you to quickly swap between building new segments and editing other segments. I appreciate that I no longer accidentally hop between the segment I want and the middle of the ride, but refining and adjusting the track as you build is annoying. Editing/adjusting the track after it is built is much better than PC1. UI for testing/changing settings on rides is bad.

Slides are clunky. RCT3 had better looking slide physics. The 'build a platform' tool always opens when placing a slide, forcing another click to swap to 'build the ride' and attach it to an existing platform. Surely that could automatically happen if you are hovering over an existing platform... It seems there are only a few options for 'pathing' through each type of slide object. In a very RCT3 looking manner, the physics cap how high up the side walls a person will go, even in extreme turns. It compensates for this by making the ride's ratings really bad, which is fair... but we're sending water dummies... let them fly out and say the ride is not safe.

The engine feels smoother, but I am on a 7800x3d/4070super. The game defaults to some god awful resolution and TAA, so it looks like someone smeared peanut butter on the camera, then covered your screen in vasoline, then drugged you... Bad choices for default settings.

Power/Water management: Did anyone ask for this? I see no value in it.

UI: Too many concessions were made for controller use of the UI. PC1 was not perfect, but the shortcut keys were intuitive. There are so many layers to each menu now that keyboard hotkeys probably couldn't get you into the right place. I would like to see the UI reverted to PC1 style, and give us a keyboard layout to match. Also, In PC1 I exclusively mashed ESC to leave menus... in PC2 this often ends up opening the escape menu behind another menu, so now I have two menus that can't be closed with escape.

Career: I am only through the very start of the career, but they so far are treating it more like the Thrillville (remember thrillville??) introduction, where there's a disembodied head talking at you, sometimes multiple. The voice lines are pretty good, but as someone who has more than their fair share of hours in PC1, I mash tab to skip. For a game about creativity, I am not in love with the extreme level of hand holding. I feel like they intended on having different levels of assistance for the first while, but didn't finish, so everyone gets babied.

I will probably finish the campaign and stop playing until a few patches have came out. Much like Cities:Skylines 2, this game was not ready for the public. I had all of the PC1 achievements in around 4 days after release, but I feel no desire to deal with the UI to get these...