When comparing Planet Coaster vs RollerCoaster Tycoon World, the Slant community recommends Planet Coaster for most people. In the question“What are the best theme park building games?” Planet Coaster is ranked 1st while RollerCoaster Tycoon World is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose Planet Coaster is:
The terrain tool is very powerful, and addition to allowing for changing the terrain height, you can also pull out horizontal jutting terrain and cut in caves in any direction with pull and push tools. An example of this in action is a sample where Mount Rushmore was created using entirely in game tools.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Powerful terrain tool that allows 3D scultping
The terrain tool is very powerful, and addition to allowing for changing the terrain height, you can also pull out horizontal jutting terrain and cut in caves in any direction with pull and push tools. An example of this in action is a sample where Mount Rushmore was created using entirely in game tools.
Pro Developers are active in and listen to the community
Pro Powerful building creator
The building designer has many construction assets that are customizable to be any color and provides an amazing amount of customization by allowing you to intersect parts and rotate them in any orientation without having to worry about clipping.
The building system has a compromise between grid based and freeform construction, in that the first object you place down creates a grid around it that you can build to but you can go off grid whenever you need to.
Pro Well put together undo system
The undo system has a long memory and tracks even small changes making it easy to fix mistakes.
Pro Made by many of the developers of RCT2 and RCT3
Pro Construction system doesn't restrict you in any way
You can clip building objects together if you want to get a specific look that requires it, or you can make floating islands if you feel like it, allowing you to create whatever fantasy or sci fi theme you desire.
Pro Steam Workshop support breathes more life into the game every day
Anyone can upload their buildings and rides to the Steam Workshop, allowing for an potentially infinite amount of items to build in your game. Giving players a place to get new content, that's user created, you have near-unlimited possibilities for how to create each park you choose. This gives many players, who find creating new rides difficult, a way to make each new park fun and exciting, as well as giving creators a way to share their work. Due to this Workshop Support, and the hundreds of rides and buildings created by users already, the life of this game is near endless, with new ideas and new way to build popping up every day.
Pro Fully customizable shops
The shops in the game are purposefully made without a facade so you can customize them however you want. If you aren't interested in customizing your own, you can also download pre-built ones from the community workshop.
Pro Real time lighting system
Lights in game light up surrounding scenery in real time making the game's night time scenes look absolutely gorgeous. Lighting objects can also be customized to be any color and come in spotlights and other kinds of lights allowing you to make the exact ambiance you want.
Pro Visitors have intelligent behavior
Visitors come to your park in groups of friends or family and walk around with each other, and they'll dance when they hear music, hold hands, and gather around performers.
Pro Every game theme has a backstory that helps immerse players further
The themes in the game aren't simply generic assets, but there's actually in-game lore created for the different entertainment characters, as well as stores and scenery, adding extra realism and depth to the game assets. Due to this, each park and asset has a fuller and more rich background, allowing players to get even more lost in this experience than in any other theme park builder yet.
Pro You can at least laugh at it
Pro Physics based water
Pro Lots of interesting pre built parts
Pro Good looking rides and decorations
Cons
Con Very large parks can lead to slowdown
The game currently isn't fully optimized to fill a large park completely without major frame rate drops.
Con Being unable to place decor and utility pieces on even slight hills is largely annoying
While pathways can be built on small hills, you will be unable to place miscellaneous assets without the use of the terrain tool. The game allows you to place buildings on these hills, however you cannot place any trashcans, benches, or any decorative piece down, as the game requires them to be build on squared-off pieces of land. Due to this, litter will pile up and the attractiveness of your park will decline unless you hire more leaning staff to pick up the excess trash, or completely undo your work and flatten the terrain.
Con Takes forever to build anything good
Yeah there's room for creativity if you have endless patience. The building is frustrating though. Only -certain- pieces will align with each other leaving you struggling to place rows of fences in a way that doesn't look obviously haphazard, and so many other things too like signs, hedgerows, lots of decor that has loads of potential but ends up looking wonky. And because the building pieces are really basic you have to spend ages building each individual scenery item if you want it to look anywhere near as good as the stuff that's already there when you load a scenario. If you don't have that patience, your parks may end up looking crap and this might make you quit out of frustration.
Con Park management system is not very sophisticated
The management options in Planet Coaster does not add much on top of the developer's previous game, Rollercoaster Tycoon 3. This means it doesn't require much work or management tweaking to get a park making money, and if you allow time to pass quickly you can just wait and let your cash reserves rise.
Con Only for PC
If you have a Mac or a Linux then you cannot play this game without BootCamp, Wine, etc.
Con Was very cheaply made to get a lot of money
Sadly Atari hired very amateur developers and tried to keep the budget as low as they could. But because of the name Roller Coaster Tycoon they made a lot of profit with this game.
Con Hard to place objects due to poor hit boxes
Decorations cannot intersect other park objects, but the hit boxes are too large to be able to place multiple objects near each other where you want to.
Con Even small parks have very bad performance on max settings
With a GTX 1080 and a very small park, the game still runs very poorly on max settings.
Con No music when zoomed in
There is only music when you go to the furthest zoom level, which you rarely go to.
Con Path assets don't snap to the right locations
It's hard to get path assets like benches or trash cans to be placed in the right location because the snapping system doesn't allow you to place them where you want them to go.
Con Graphics settings cannot be changed in game
Con Has switched development between 3 studios
The game was originally developed by Pipeworks Software, then passed off to Area 52 Games, and then finally to Nvizzio Creations. Typically when a game switches hands that many times it's indicative of troublesome development and later developers may have more trouble adapting to the work of the other studios.
Con Development team doesn't listen to players
The development team promised a lot but hasn't really done anything about the huge complaints.
Con Pathing system is incredibly finicky and hard to use
It is very hard to make paths on a grid or parallel to each other and it's hard to get the paths to connect where you want them to, and the snap to path system makes it near impossible to select the right spot.
Also, path segments are created in oddly sized chunks making them very hard to customize.
Con Takes a while to load parks
Con Many visual glitches with character walk animations
Lots of times character walk animations freeze while the character continues to move, and the walk and run animations look very awkward.