The only thing Adventure Park really adds to the table is animal rides, and I'm really grabbing at straws with this; the game doesn't really have much to offer at all.
The miniscule selection of rides leaves me starved for content; the game's campaign challenges you to create 5 "Theme Parks" but the selection of rides is so limited that it's nearly impossible to actually stick to aThe only thing Adventure Park really adds to the table is animal rides, and I'm really grabbing at straws with this; the game doesn't really have much to offer at all.
The miniscule selection of rides leaves me starved for content; the game's campaign challenges you to create 5 "Theme Parks" but the selection of rides is so limited that it's nearly impossible to actually stick to a theme. Both the Ferris-Wheel and the Big Dropper Thing, as well as this spinney thing (I think it's a merry-go-round), are all pirate themed (I think later on in the game you get space themed versions but that's about it). If you want any of those things, you have to have a pirate themed park, or otherwise just throw them into your South American Aztec park just to complete the mission, because you need more revenue, it's not like the NPCs will even notice. The game probably would have benefited from being more generic in that respect. A generic circus-tent Mary-Go-Round will fit anywhere but what on earth is a giant octopus doing in the middle of a desert? Or maybe not because that would make the unimpressive selection of rides even more dull. Sure it doesn't effect the core gameplay but it sure as hay kills the fun of making a THEME park.
Speaking of gameplay, the difficulty is schizophrenic. Satisfying the NPCs' needs is easy enough. Little icons pop up above their head when they feel the park is missing something, and you just plonk down a decoration or tree to make them happy. But giving each ride the right price is an utter pain. Sure it tells you what the NPCs think of the price point but only when they walk up to the stall and voluntarily see if they want to enter the ride. This can make things nearly impossible if nobody actually seems interested in the ride for one reason or another. This happened to me in the Safari ride in the Pirate Island, where the little tooltip said it was just the right price but upon further inspection the ride was receiving zero passengers a month. It made adjusting the price properly very tedious because rather than tell me the ride was too expensive, they'd just avoid it entirely, never triggering an "It's too expensive" notification.
And the act of making the NPCs happy I mentioned earlier? The second Park requires you to get a park rating of 95% by doing all that. But no matter what I do, the park rating outright refused to get any higher than 90%, the guest-book was full to bursting with happy remarks and many of them had a completely green happiness bar or what ever you want to call it but at one point my Park Rating actually dropped to 85% while the same thing was happening. I'm not even sure what was going on there, but at that point I didn't even care.
The whole time I spent playing this game I wanted to boot up Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, something I should have done in the first place. When all your game is good at is making somebody want to play something else, that's a REALLY BAD sign.… Expand