First of all, lets give a small brief backstory to this game. Chris Sawyer is a game developer who created such series as Transport Tycoon mostly in x86 Assembly Language. He created a game called Rollercoaster Tycoon whilst working on the sequel to TTD, which became one of the best selling and most well known simulation/management video games of all time. He also developed the sequel to Rollercoaster Tycoon (Rollercoaster Tycoon 2) which was praised but also criticized for feeling more like the first game but with very minor graphical improvements and new rides/parks.
However, since the series was acquired by Atari, Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 was developed by Frontier Developments, with Chris Sawyer only acting as a consultant on the development of this game. While on one hand, Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 brings a lot of graphical and gameplay improvements, such as a fully 3D game engine, a sandbox mode, an improved coaster-cam and guests of different genders and ages, the reality is that it all looks a bit cheap and tacky in some areas, especially with the way guests look and parts of the user interface.
The other fact is that Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 is bug ridden. And many of these bugs have not even been patched. The worse part is that many of these bugs can be game breakingly frustrating, and that if you are affected by one of these bugs, you will have next to no chance to recuperate from it while managing a park.
The first bug which I found was one which randomly lowers the Excitement Rating of a ride. I've often had expensive rollercoasters go from a high excitement rating to a near-zero excitement rating, which meant that for that reason, no-one was going on the ride anymore. With no way to actually fix this problem other than closing the right and reconstructing part of it, this bug is common and VERY frustrating.
Another frequent bug is to do with pathing. Sometimes, when creating paths, they will not interjoin with each other. This actually screwed me over once when I was in a park, was going to connect a path near the entrance when it suddenly nuked the path going out of the entrance. Hence, no-one could actually get into the park from the entrance gate. What did I have to do? Start over again. Thanks RCT3. That was a really crap move you pulled there.
One more frequent bug I've found was to do with guest pathing. Even though I built paths all around the park, I got loads of messages spammed at me saying various guests had their paths blocked and that I needed to build more paths and connect them greatly. WELL HOW, WHEN THE PATHS CONNECT PERFECTLY?
What else is underwhelming about RCT3? The way guests look. They look hideously bad in this game. The scenarios also suck. You will never get anything nearly as memorable as Forest Frontiers, Dusty Dunes or Diamond Heights in this game.
