RollerCoaster Tycoon Adventures Deluxe (Switch) Review

Growing up, I was always a big management and sim player: Sim City, Sim Farm and even Sim Golf. Then there was the wonderful and charming Theme Hospital and, of course, Theme Park from Bullfrog. All of these games had a wonderful charm and in-depth management of said Hospitals and Theme Parks and allowed you to make something that was yours. However, one franchise I never got into was Rollercoaster Tycoon, and I’m not sure why. But now, in 2023, here on the Nintendo Switch, I thought, yeah, I’ll give this a go finally, but this doesn’t seem to be the Rollercoaster Tycoon of old. Because there’s no way this was popular.

RollerCoaster Tycoon Adventures Deluxe is a glorified re-release of RollerCoaster Tycoon Adventures from 2018. They’ve added some new rides and the ability to customise and colour them, but it doesn’t seem like they’ve done much of anything else to justify this being a whole separate release.

The game itself is based on a mobile version of RollerCoaster Tycoon; now, just being based on a mobile game is alright in itself – plenty of mobile games are just fine games. However, RollerCoaster Tycoon Touch was like most mobile games with a bunch of pervasive timed mechanics, unlocking things with credits that take time, you know, all that usual rubbish. Luckily, none of that is in the Switch version of the game; however, without it – it’s almost like the game has no soul. More on that in second.

The interface has been perfectly adapted for the Switch and a controller. You can make a nice looking park, with exciting rides, and place buildings where staff look after the park and the people will flock in. There’s a fully formed Rollercoaster creator, which, while simple, lets you make something your own, even if you can’t ride it. Unfortunately, without the timed and gated content unlocking, almost everything is so simple, and there’s virtually no challenge to the game. The game becomes a simple task of getting the bars at the bottom of the screen to stay up. Eventually, the game breaks down as well because things will wear out, and you’ll have to drop prices on rides, or people will be unhappy. But that’s about as far as the management goes. There’s no hiring and firing of staff, buying supplies, or restocking stores. It’s all just done for you.

Then there’s the other problem with the game: it doesn’t work right on the Nintendo Switch. I can’t comment on the older non-Delxue version of the game, but looking at gameplay compared to what I’ve been playing, it might have gotten worse? The game runs fine for the most part until you start building out your park past the initial open slots on the map. (This map is all level; you can’t terraform anything or do anything interesting like that). Eventually, the game got so bad that just dropping flowers around rides caused the game to become a slideshow, with one or two seconds taking place before I could move the cursor and drop something else. The rides in the background will slow down. It all just comes crawling to a halt.

I moved the game from my MicroSD card to internal storage to check if it was my card was dying. Nope, just the problems. It also still takes way too long to load into the game. I haven’t seen a game with a loading bar take that long in quite some time.

If I had to say something nice about the game, it does feel like a way to waste some time and have some fun. But the bigger your park gets, the slower it goes, and I just couldn’t get involved in the game knowing that all you had to do to “win” was build more – which I couldn’t do.

There is new content here, and the UI has been updated, but I’m still unsure why this Deluxe version of the game exists. If you have the non-Deluxe version of the game, you’re not missing anything. The developers had five years to make the game run better, or at least passable. You’re better off playing this on anything other than the Switch; at least it would work despite its shortcomings.

Rating: 2/5