RollerCoaster Tycoon® 4 Mobile™ Review
PROS
- Building your park is quite satisfying
- Controls are, for the most part, responsive and intuitive
CONS
- Pay to free-to-play
- Fiddly coaster construction
- Premium price tag turns out to be a downpayment on consumable currency
VERDICT
Rollercoaster Tycoon 4 Mobile mighthave been a reasonable free-to-play title, as a premium game, its greed is too much to stomach.
- Full Review
- App Store Info
Initital impressions of Rollercoaster Tycoon 4 are decent. As with previous entries in the PC series, you must build up your theme park in order to attract customers and their money. Any cash you make can then be poured back into your park, creating an endless but satisfying cycle of development and expansion.
Constructing your park is simple. You select the desired building from a list, and then drag it into place using the touchscreen controls. Every building, be it a merry-go-round or a hotel, brings in more customers and more cash.
However, it’s the roller coasters that are the big draw. They're also most exciting, and most confusing, part of Rollercoaster Tycoon 4. You can make them as sprawling, or as tightly wound, as you like, but not without difficulties. It can take minutes of fiddling with even the simplest track to work out what is hindering your construction. Sometimes the slope is too steep, maybe there is a tree in the way.
The thing is, the game doesn't tell you why you can't build a particular structure.This makes the building process frustrating. There is an auto complete function if you're really struggling to craft your coaster, but even this fails to rectify construction issues.
The other problem is the game's microtransaction system. Though you might think you're paying for a premium game, you're essentially buying credit up front at a reduced rate. You're gifted $5 of in-game currency when you start playing, which can be used to bypass build timers. However, when it runs out - which it will do very quickly - you'll have to hand over more cash, or wait for hours for timers to tick down. If the game was free-to-play, this might be forgivable. However, in a premium game, it comes off as awfully cynical.
Rollercoaster Tycoon 4 Mobile might have worked as an attractive free-to-play reimagining of the series. Instead, what we have is a premium game with nasty free-to-play elements. This is one rollercoaster we just wanted to get off.
Screenshots
FREE
