Way back when I was a young pup, I used to go to Hersheypark every summer and it was a fun experience. Riding the Trailblazer, getting soaked on the Canyon River Rapids, and being whipped around on the Whip, Hersheypark was amazing. But, like most things in life, I ended up growing out of it and stopped going but, deep down, I still enjoyed amusement parks and wouldn’t mind going to one again. The original Roller Coaster Tycoon on PC helped in this regard and I put about who knows how many hours into it, designing my own theme park and creating fun roller coasters. So, when I heard about the console release of ‘Parkitect’, I was excited and I had hoped for another fun roller coaster sim but, alas, this wasn’t meant to be.
If you are familiar with other park sims, especially the aforementioned Roller Coaster Tycoon series, then you’ll be right at home with Parkitect as the same principles apply here. That is you place rides and concession stands and do your best to keep the visitors happy and safe. But if you never played one before or need a refresher, there is a very helpful tutorial to get you started and I love when games include something like this to help the new players out. There’s also a nice selection of rides to choose from to create your dreamland, everything from gentle rides like ferris wheels to the extreme ones like roller coasters, though you only have a small handful when you first start a map. Thankfully, like RCT, you’ll unlock more via research and the rides you can unlock can help make your park either the ultimate tourist destination or the next Action Park and there are a nice selection of rides to unlock.
You can also customize just about everything in the game, from the rides to the various concession stands and even the toilets. I kid you not, you can have your visitors pay a pound to drop a pound, which is both evil and pretty funny, if you think about it. Being evil aside, you can change just about everything on a ride, from its colors to even the music choices and there is a nice selection of premade tunes to choose from and each one is catchy to listen to and won’t get annoying after hearing them for the umpteenth time in your park. You can even place and customize decorations around your park to suit your park’s look and style, everything from trees to rocks to even props like planes, trains, and automobiles. Honestly, I did have some fun just building and designing my own dream park and I LOVE how the game has a sandbox mode so you can play with unlimited funds and no objectives, something I wish more games of this caliber would have from the outset.
So you’re probably thinking I recommend this game, right? Sadly, it does not as the cons far outweigh the pros. I’m just gonna flat out say it: This style of game just doesn’t work on consoles. Now, I have played some that managed to work, like Screamride and the 2013’s Zoo Tycoon, but most of the time, they just don’t and Parkitect is one such example. These types of games thrive on precise control and the constant opening and closing of menus, which is something you can easily do on a PC but on a console? No. There’s also the fact that this game is poorly optimized. Most of my sessions involved me fighting with the controls or dealing with menus that were misbehaving badly. Like, sometimes when I went to open the radial menu, it immediately opened an option that I didn’t want to open and I had to close that menu and try again. Other times, the menus would glitch out and I couldn’t scroll through it at all, having to, again, exit the menu and try again. I even had a bug that occurred when I went to try to load a save up and the menu glitched and wouldn’t let me load it, instead pushing my cursor to the map screen. This one happened on multiple occasions and the only way I found to fix it was to load up a new game in the map and load the save game up that way. When your Save/Load menu, something essential in gaming, is this bad? That’s a problem.
It’s not just the menus I had problems with either, as there were other issues in the game that really soured my enjoyment. Decorating, which is a huge part of any park, is another hassle. Unlike the other items which are attached via the grid system, the decorations aren’t and you have to be very precise on where you want said decorative item to go. There’s also the aforementioned issue I had with needing employee and restock buildings for the stands, the fact that building a roller coaster, while fun, can turn into a chore as you can’t autocomplete it and, due to not being able to move the camera when building a coaster, you can’t really gauge where track pieces will go, especially when trying to hook the tracks up to the starting area. Not to mention that customization, even though it’s fun, is tedious and slow due to, again, having to use the imprecise controls and that, being on consoles, you can’t have your own custom music, so no building your own Rock N Roll Roller Coaster Starring Van Hagar. There’s also the fact that you need to have employee buildings and restock buildings in order to have a concession stand operate. You see, when you place, for example, a pizza stand, you’ll see a small icon saying they are out of stock. In-order to stock them, you first need to build a restock building behind it, then you need to attach a employee pathway to the stand, then you need to build an underground pipe-system to the stand, THEN you have to connect the stand to the restock building in order to let the workers know that this stand needs to be restocked. This got very tedious very quickly and I wish it didn’t exist. This isn’t helped by the fact that if you place one of these employee buildings, you have to cover it with decorations or your park-goers will be unhappy with the sight of said building, which makes me question the mindset of the goers. Like, do they think the concession stands just magically get more food and the litter on the ground is just magically swooped away by some unseen force?
I didn’t really hate Parkitect, let me get that out of the way right now, as there were parts of it I really did enjoy. But the cons really did outweigh the good and I ended up really just being disappointed by what was on offer here. I no doubt believe the game is much more fun on PCs and I also think that there are park sims that can work on consoles. Just that, Parkitect wasn’t one of those games and, personally, I really feel it should’ve stayed on PCs or, at the very least, had some extra time in the oven to better optimize it for consoles.
