Recent reviews by David Goggins

Started to play about a year ago.

Like many older players, I have stopped to play FP. For various reasons, but the main one is to stick to my word of not playing the game anymore once some bad decisions were made by devs and no sign of coming back to a "more friendly" environement for US gamers have been done. Don't get me wrong, those decisions were bad for US the GAMERS, ofc, said decisions were good for the real life economy of the developpement team. Of course a balance is needed, but it seems that for them to reach this balance, it seemed to us players, that it went overboard.

New players reminder - Never forget history
So as a reminder to all newer players.
The game is grindy, and I have no issue with that.
It was a year ago, to grind through the levels, but that at least you could deal with maybe taking your time and play a little more relaxed. Now it's grindy to cover your in game expanses.

A year ago, while you grinded for levels, the in-game money was far less an issue, and you could buy unlimited licenses WITH IN GAME CURRENCY. The regular one, you get from any fish you catch and sell. That meant you could also, managing your money, buy said unlimited licenses, for the waterways you unlocked, and keep grinding your levels, while beeing able to play way more casually, maybe 1/2h when you had time or if you were willing to play only 1/2h on a given night. That made it a REAL F2P game, even for a more casual fanbase.

Now, due to the fact that unlimited licenses are ONLY purchasable through BAITCOINS (so they cost real money, because there is no way to earn enough of them playing the game, unless you are very very good and earning them with competitions).
Now, you can still play for free, IF and that's the BIG IF, you play enough hours everytime you decide to play the game. Making it either you can't play casual anymore unless you are willing to stick to the very first lake, or are willing to pay REAL HUGE $ to get the unlimited licenses with your wallet.... and damn, those are expansive... to get all the unlimited licenses you need more money than any AAA game currently available.

Shady decisions
Currently, there were enough instances where devs show how they managed to get as many incomes as possible, by even playing a kind of "unfair" game.
Examples :
You can earn baitcoins during holliday events.
The first event since they introduced the baitcoins and gave back the player the ability to earn them while playing the game on a larger amount than what you currently get (lvl up, achievements and log daily after 5 days, but those are really small amounts, and in a tiny bit larger amount, placing in 3 first places in comps and tourneys) was St-Patricks in march 2017. They soon realized peeps cought the event fishes in a decent amount. Realizing how much money they could potentially loose, they tried to nerf the rates for said event fishes, creating a revolt in the players community. They were forced to revert back for that event, where you could get baitcoins for every single event fish.

All the events afterward saw small baitcoins amount by completing achievements (which are insanely high compared to catchrates of said event fishes) but can be continued the year after, and thus also LOCKING the max amount you can get anyway, since once an achievement is completed... you get my point.)

New players, NEVER EVER FORGET that older players like me could get and keep ALL UNLIMITED LICENSES without any reset after the game went from Early Access to full realease... thus making older players at a real advantage toward the moneygrab. While I'm ofc happy for myself, I can't keep thinking IT'S NOT FAIR GAME for all of YOU newcomers...

Devs promised boats loooong ago, even before I started playing.... they finally introduced Kayaks lately. And those were, either available for rent for a quite large amount of in-game currency, or purchasable through DLC (overpriced once more ?). That lasted for quite some weeks, to make sure as many peeps as possible that wanted kayaks early on after introduction bought them for real money... now they are available with in-game currency as well...
While devs sticked to their word for boats to be available with both in-game currency and real life money, the way they implemented it in 2 steps show how they do things. I don't know how peeps that bought kayaks from DLC feel... I would feel betrayed...
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EDIT from mid March 2018 update :
And now they decided it was time to implement an other great shady decision to try to milk more money... It's now time to have a limited storage in your house... and new player will start with a great 50 storage slots... Needless to say that this 50 limit will be quickly reached, and then, if you want more... time to grab your wallet.
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Conclusion
Don't get me wrong, the game [is] WAS fair as playability goes, is great graphically, and can be very pleasing.

When I started playing, there were already a lot of negative comments toward the developpement team, and I thought "Oh well, those crybabies, and ragers..."
Now, after seeing it going for a full year, I have finally reached that side of players.

I fully get devs need money to keep the game running, to keep developping, and to keep servers up... I just truely think that the current F2P (not so F2P anymore unless you have lots of time to play) does not serve the game's quality.
A one time purchasable game, even at a AAA price, and beeing more casualy playable would greatly beneficiate the whole community, and the fun you could get from the game. Currently the game is more of a "second job" just to be able to play it in a high level lake, unless once again, you own unlimited licenses.

This negative review is more aimed toward developpement choices, toward dev's way to make things happen (very often unclear and in "shady" ways, to make sure you will bite on what they offer) and toward it's F2P marketing model.

I had fun with the game early on, I still did have fun for a small amount of time after the whole economy revamp mid january 2017 while in hope of seeing improvements toward players, but since, while devs claim the game hasn't been nerfed, you can clearely see that maybe not the catchrates was nerfed, but the sizes of fishes, (more smaller ones and lesser large ones, specially on low level lakes that used to be fun, even for a higher lvl player).
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EDIT from mid March 2018 update :
And now with that great new storage limit decision, it seems pretty clear that this developpement team has simply no clue as to how they can monetize their game, and with how to face their self-implemented issues, aka (as they said themselves) having issues overflowing the servers with too many items that needs to be loaded. Probably also a result of the implementation of PS4 version and the rush of fresh players that they can't handle with the too low incomes... Seems things did not go as well as planned to be that deseperate for such a move...
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Educated choices
There are currently other alternatives for fishing games, so I encourage you to watch YouTubers that have played or still cover FP, and look around their videos to see what choices you have, before you "donate" some real life hard earned incomes. make educated choices, you are neither forced to buy anything for real money to play this game, you just need lot of spare time, and if you don't have such sparetime, you are not forced to play this game. As a "customer" you have the power to choose to play or not to play...

I chose the latter for this game, to display my desagrement with how things went.

The Rollercoaster Tycoon games were near and dear to my heart growing up. I love management and tycoon games, and for whatever reason the magic of theme parks made a really great video game. I’ve lost hours and hours to the scenarios in RCT 1, building in the sandbox in RCT 2, and playing with various trainers to break the game how I see fit. RCT 3, however, marked a rough transition into 3D. There were a lot of problems with the game, and I honestly never enjoyed them very much.

There’s business drama of some sort with the ownership of the name of the game, and there actually is an Atari published successor to RCT 3 called Rollercoaster Tycoon World, but apparently the verdict is that the entire thing is a hot mess. The folks who developed RCT 3, Frontier Development, went on to create Planet Coaster as a spiritual successor to the RCT series.

Although I didn’t enjoy RCT 3 very much, I’ve really loved my time with Planet Coaster, and I can already tell that I’m going to be spending a nasty amount of time with this game. There is a lot to digest here, and I think that a lot of the criticisms I have won’t apply to the majority of people who would be interested in buying this game. I think it is necessary to give the game two ratings – one for casual folks who are looking for a fun tycoon game, and one for people who have a Drexler patched copy of RCT 1.

It really seems as if Frontier aimed to make this game primarily a sandbox game with a dependence on user-generated content. The campaign is amazingly short, and some missions can actually be finished in a matter of seconds on accident. There are tons of coaster types, shop types, and scenery objects but very few ploppable pre-built options. The shops you can place down are little 1x1 generic box-shaped grid pieces that are clearly meant to be built upon, and the game also defaults you into a building view for constructing something around it. Very few sample coasters exist to play with. There are tons of generic scenery and building blocks for building cool stuff, though. If you’re willing to spend hours building things, you’re in luck!

The workshop support is really easy. You open it up in the shift+tab menu, subscribe to something, and it is immediately in your game. The workshop tagging needs a lot of cleaning up right now, and it can be difficult to find quality content. Even though the integration is pretty simple, it isn’t very fun to go hunting for good content to use in your maps. The really complex workshop items also sometimes come unfinished due to built-in limits the workshop has, which makes me wonder because this game really emphasizes the user-created content aspect. I’ve downloaded more than one item that requires me to build the roof, or place the paths, and it can get really frustrating to finish these things sometimes. Downloading maps and other things that people have worked on is a lot of fun, there are some really incredible things out there.

A huge problem I had with RCT3 is that building precisely in a 3D space is difficult. I have similar problems with Cities: Skylines when compared to Simcity 4; 3D spaces end up with weird curves and other buggy moments when building things. Planet Coaster is also victim to this. You’ll probably end up with lots of oddly shaped pathways and coaster supports. This is a difficult problem to explain but it becomes really evident when you’re trying to connect curved pathways together that are at slightly different angles. They’ll never couple together cleanly and leave weird gaps.

I have a lot of Quality-of-life problems that I wish this game had. I wish I could have my coasters constantly testing without a janky workaround, and I wish I could run ghost trains instead of constantly crashing real trains. If I’m in a scenario trying to build a coaster, it’s goofy that I can keep crashing my trains and hitting the peeps and nobody seems to mind. I feel like nobody on earth wants to delete their entire roller coaster when they hit the “delete” key while placing paths after they built a coaster. The UI is really ugly and feels like it is in beta still, and it is tough to navigate to find what I need.

I feel like the way the game measures stats for rides is somewhat broken, because I’ll have a coaster that has a great rating up until the last ten seconds where it brakes going into the station and slows down, and that little section will kill the average of my coaster making everyone think it is boring. I had a coaster in one map with a 135mph top speed and a 100 meter drop with tons of twists and lots of great moments, but because the last thirty seconds were a slow moment to ease back into the station, people in my park thought it was boring and avoided riding it. I used to be able to build incredible coasters in RCT1/2 (9+ excitement), but I can’t seem to break 5 excitement in Planet Coaster.

I have a lot of things I could say about this game, but ultimately Steam has a review limit, so I’m going to wrap it up.

I would not recommend this game if you are looking for a management game, or if the scenarios were the meat of your playtime in RCT1. You’ll likely blow through the scenarios very quickly, and you’ll definitely be frustrated at the lack of ploppable coasters and buildings. If you don’t enjoy sitting down to work on the right angle to bank your coasters, I would probably recommend skipping this game.

If you’re looking for a really hardcore sandbox to spend hours building the monster roller coaster of your dreams, this is probably your game. After all of your hard work setting up trigger points, banking turns, measuring speed, you can sit down and ride your coaster. Riding things is pretty damn fun after all your work is done.

If you also like to download things from the workshop, and think you could get a lot of fun out of downloading crazy things that people have spent hours working on, you could probably eek some good time out of this.

I have a tough time giving a good rating to this game, but I also don’t feel like it is a bad game. I feel like it is a lazy game. I don’t get why they didn’t include more ploppable samples for players to use. There are tons of coaster types, at least two dozen, and then there are something like seven sample coasters. That’s just silly, and these depressing numbers carry over to every part of the game. I don’t get why there are only nine measly scenarios. The sandbox maps the game ships with are boring flatlands. The whole thing feels janky.

But I know the potential this game has. With very little time since the game has released, folks have already build some incredible stuff. I’m very curious what is to come.

Whether or not you'll like this game boils down to whether or not you like intense creative sandboxes. This is not a good management game, even if the game makes an attempt at being one. The potential is certainly here, since you have some pretty powerful control over certain aspects of the park, such as opening times (which doesn't seem to change anything), staff management, and customizable options with vendors. The management side of the game can be totally trivialized by putting down a cluster of shops and rides very close to your entrance. Congratulations on the money farm.

If you're the kind of person who played Rollercoaster Tycoon, placed a balloon shop, and thought to yourself about how annoying it was that the balloon shop was a few pixels taller than all the other shops requiring an entirely special setup to fit it inside a building, then Planet Coaster just might be the game for you. This is the spiritual successor to those hundreds of hours we spent as a kid playing RCT1 with the Drexler patch and a trainer, or building sandbox coasters in RCT2, and even riding your custom rides in RCT3.

I only grinded to Level 18 just to play as Tiffany Cox ;)

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ love this game <3

I think this game has a lot of portential. It's a very cool theme and I love the way it is designed. unfortuantly the graphics are a little weird. Whenever i put it on high it dosent change. But it is laggy? and low is just way to bad for graphics and it looks terrible. Over all I love the game and Im having great fun. +1

this game is very good,only when you're actually in the game. Not when you're getting lauchpad connection errors and black screens. Oh and did I forget when it says you're in the game but oyou're actually not. This game is fun doe shooting ppl and zombies like a boss. kms Xd ya