Parkitect

Parkitect is a worthy successor to RollercoasterTycoon, but never emerges from its shadow.

Parkitect is pleasant to the point where it turns into a problem. Its gentle pace and inoffensive aesthetic makes it easy to get sucked into and spend a good amount of time with, but its desire to please also makes Parkitect rather risk averse. In a year that has witnessed some bold and innovative management sims, Parkitect plays too safe to stand out from the likes of modern hits such as Megaquarium. The game negotiates a pleasing balance between building and maintaining your theme park. Beyond the constraints of budget and available rides, you are free to create your park however you like. You can fill your park with standard rides and user-created coasters, or get hands-on with every detail, sculpting terrain, tweaking the turns and loops of every coaster, and constructing your own facades and decorations out of geometric shapes.

Creatively, Parkitect is sufficiently robust, although less powerful than the toolset of Planet Coaster. Paths can only be built in straight lines, while terrain cannot be manipulated with much fidelity. Where Parkitect has the edge on its rivals, however, is in how it challenges you to think harder about the layout and upkeep of your park.

Parkitect boasts a similar system to Megaquarium, whereby your visitors don’t enjoy seeing how the sausage is made. Your park’s overall rating partly comes down to its ‘immersion’ factor, which is damaged when John and Jane Middleclass see some poorly paid laborer stuffing boxes of frankfurters into the back of your $7 hot-dog stand.

You can avoid visitors witnessing the horror of capitalist exploitation by careful placement of special ‘Employee’ paths, which can be concealed with decorations like hedges and fences. Alternatively, you can build a network of supply depots connected by underground tubes to ferry stock around the park, then use haulers to transport the stock from depot to the stalls. It’s more efficient, but also more expensive.

These hints of strategy are complemented by a robust simulation where everything that happens in the game has a tangible impact on the status of your park. If your park is accosted by vandals, you can see them running around kicking over bins and benches, and this will impact your park’s ‘dirtiness’ rating. Meanwhile, if a storm passes over your park, rides will be shut down and your profits will start to tumble.

Parkitect isn’t short of stuff to do. Alongside the sandbox mode, the campaign includes 26 different parks to build, each of which has its own unique set of challenges. There are also dozens of rides to unlock, and the coaster selection is particularly impressive, ranging from simple junior coasters to log flumes, flying coasters, and even a bobsled run.

You can’t fault Parkitect for its generosity, or for its cleanly designed simulation. Nonetheless, it does exhibit a few issues. Most prominent is the UI, which is poorly designed. There’s no undo button, so any mistakenly placed objects have to be manually demolished. Meanwhile, Parkitect’s coaster building feels positively Neolithic compared to dragging and pulling out rides in Planet Coaster.

fun fare?

More generally, though, Parkitect’s presentation is staid. I’m particularly nonplussed by the bobbleheaded characters, which makes your park look like it’s populated by Funko Pops. Parkitect does take on more personality at night, when your rides are suddenly illuminated by hundreds of tiny lights, but these moments are fleeting.

Parkitect is the most well-rounded theme-park simulator of recent years. But if you look at the management sim genre more broadly, there’s stiff competition. From the quirky and characterful Two Point Hospital, to Megaquarium, which has a similar structure (and visual style) to Parkitect, but applies it to a very different setting. Both those games bring something interesting and memorable to the genre. Parkitect, for all of its quality, is content to be a fairground attraction, fun, and mechanically sound, but not something that you’re going to want to queue up hours for.

Parkitect’s coaster building feels positively Neolithic