Coaster Crazy Deluxe is the latest game from Frontier Games, the guys behind theme park sims – Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 and Thrillville. How Coaster Crazy differs from Frontier’s previous games though is that rather than worrying about the cost of admission, price of soda and all the other crap that goes along with managing a theme park, it jumps straight to the best bit: creating the coolest rollercoaster you can whilst satisfying certain criteria. Be it placing a certain number of drops or loops, maintaining or exceeding a certain speed or costing a certain amount, among many others. Bonus points are gained for keeping excitement levels high and nausea levels low. As such it’s more of a puzzle game than management sim and is all the better for it.
My first experience of Coaster Crazy Deluxe was playing a preview build of the games sandbox mode at the Nintendo booth at this year’s Eurogamer. Two things were clear to me after my brief hands on. Firstly, that I wanted to play more, and secondly, that I had well and truly pissed off the game’s attendant.
It turns out the guy at the stand in the blue Nintendo tee might have taken the family friendly mantra his bosses may have fed him a little bit too seriously He obviously didn’t appreciate my attempts to create the highest, fastest, most nausea inducing rollercoaster possible. A feat that killed everyone on board whilst I chuckled like an idiot as I watched my test subjects chucking up like Linda Blair in the exorcist before hitting the eject button so they went hurtling out of the car and plummeted to the ground, bouncing off the track as they went..
This brief alteration came to a head after telling me repeatedly to not be so sadistic; he grabbed the pad off me, attempted to tame my insane creation and crashed the game in the process.
I know this might not sound like a recommendation in the traditional sense, but it was some of the best fun I had that weekend,
So when I saw that it was finally out on the eshop I had to grab a copy to see what the rest of the game was like, and whether that giddy sense of mischief carried through to the full game.
I
t does, and then some. It runs through it from end to end. Coaster Crazy Deluxe is one of those rare and brilliant beasts where failure is often times more entertaining than success. There was no way that what I had built at the booth was going to work. I knew it wouldn’t; the turns were too sharp, it went too fast and everything was banked so sharply I knew at some point the car was coming off the tracks.
It scored sky high in excitement… and nausea, but I didn’t care. Starting at an extreme and taming your imagination, refining your creations is half the game and most of the fun.
This becomes even more important as you begin the play through the main game itself in which you open up new rides in different parks all over the globe. Using money earned from your previous coasters to buy the subsequent plots of land to make your next crazy contraption.
Each plot basically acts as a new puzzle to solve as you’ll be given a set of challenges, starting off simply enough like get x amount of points and have a couple of drop s to eventually Herculean tasks of catering to all the conflicting desires of your testers. For example having a high excitement and fear level, but never exceeding a speed of 55 miles per hour.
Simple enough, you think as you begin construction. Drawing the route of your roller coaster onto the touch screen and watching as it springs to life, in real time, right before your eyes. The combination of touch controls and traditional button inputs enable you to effortlessly create and modify your coaster down to the smallest detail: adjusting the tracks length, height and banking as well as adding loops, corkscrews and other special pieces that do all kinds of weird and wonderful things.
Once you’ve finished your rollercoaster it’s time for your crazy test subjects to jump on board and take it for a spin, more often than not crashing headlong into something, chucking their guts up or getting stuck half way round and then careening back to the start. As the test commences you can use the accelerometer to look around in first person mode or use various other camera controls to see how the roller coaster handles the various twists and turns. At the end of each test your efforts are scored, rated from 1-5 stars and you see whether it’s passed each of the stages challenges. With every successful test, you’re gifted with extra cash to make further improvements and experience, which unlocks new track, car types and available plots to purchase as you level up.
After much tinkering and testing, eventually you’ll satisfy all the challenge criteria for that plot, at which point you can upload your creation to the games leader boards for other player to see it in action, open your roller coaster to the public, move onto the next plot with a new set of challenges, and start all over again.
On paper at least, I’ll admit that this does sound potentially a little repetitive, however the game avoids this pitfall by making each of the games plots and challenges unique as well and each type of rollercoaster you can unlock not only increasingly more complex but work very differently from one another.
It also helps that the games visuals are incredibly charming with your test subject crazies particularly charming and emotive. Watching their eyes bulge with fear and chuckle as they are thrown skyward as something goes catastrophically wrong, never gets old.
Coaster Crazy Deluxe might not be the most complex game on the eshop, it might not be one the prettiest either but it certainly is one of the most charming, one of the cleverest, one of the most addictive. At only £5.99 considering I’ve lost almost a week of my life to this game and it has flown by, it’s certainly value for money.
If you were expecting something akin to Roller Coaster Tycoon or Theme Park, you may be disappointed with Coaster Crazy Deluxe, as it isn’t a full theme park simulator in the traditional sense but, if you’re looking for a game that gives you all the fun of the fair but none of the aggravation, Coaster Crazy Deluxe is certainly the game for you.
