Every facility is essentially just a small cube with a little gap in the middle for vendors to ply their wares, and then the building housing the service, whether it’s a toilet or a burger stand, is constructed around it.
You aren’t simply placing buildings in a park, you’re designing them as well. Planet Coaster goes one level deeper than a lot of management games. The tools to expand this slight roster, however, are substantial. I found the perfect map, an empty American desert, but quickly hit my first obstacle: there aren’t many prefabricated buildings, and they’re mostly themed around pirates and medieval fantasy. “Wouldn’t it be fun to make Westworld,” I thought to myself, entirely missing the point of the show. It is also a game that inspired me to spend an entire hour constructing a toilet, which inexplicably left me very satisfied.
Frontier’s theme park management game, Planet Coaster, does both, letting you create theme parks where the worst thing that can happen is lots of people vomiting. During tumultuous times, there’s comfort to be found in games that peddle nostalgia or task you with making people happy and keeping them entertained.
