Roller Coaster Tycoon

Rollercoaster Tycoon Platinum is a theme park building simulator game.

The game is actually the third in the Rollercoaster Tycoon series, with all the downloadable content installed from the start. This includes the water park modification Soaked and the animal park addition Wild.

Rollercoaster Tycoon is a fun sim that allows you to create and run your own theme parks.

There are three play modes: Sandbox, Scenario or Career. In Career you must earn money from the attractions you build in order to progress. This means you set your prices at the optimum rate and place food and drink stands in just the right places as well as build awesome rides that have people flocking back for more. You must aim everything at making a profit, as you can only buy additional attractions if you have the cash to do so. More rides are unlocked as you progress.

Sandbox mode has all the resources of Career, except everything is unlocked from the beginning. You can also control the time of day and you have infinite amounts of money to spend. This gives you free rein to create the fantasy theme park of your dreams.

The Scenario mode gives you a series of mini-tasks, or levels, to complete in a certain timescale. You can also download additional scenarios created by users. These can be anything from building an exciting rollercoaster to completing a fireworks display in a set time. New scenarios unlock as you go along.

The game is a lot of fun, giving you a massive scope to create and build some amazing rides, and then see people flock to your park and enjoy them. And it isn't just rollercoasters; there are water slides, animal attractions, fireworks, refreshment kiosks, monorails and ghost trains. The rides are given intensity ratios on how scary and exciting they are and while the temptation is to build the scariest ride ever, just remember – little kids will not ride on it and it could be a money-losing flop, no matter how wild it is!

The start-up tutorials are easy to understand and the game is a dream to play – you will be building rides within minutes of playing.

Rollercoaster Tycoon has a massive amount of resources and you are unlikely to ever become bored designing your own theme parks.

Pros

• Simple menus
• Fun design

Cons

• Non-infinite worlds
• Processor-heavy