Recent reviews by Tooki

Outstanding game that deserves more support. There is certainly room for improvement, but the sound design and core gameplay is fantastic.

Very disappointed with the lack of ultrawide support. Vertical minus is not acceptable in 2021.

Obviously there is barely any content in the game yet so this should be taken with a grain of salt, but everything feels very janky, even compared to other early access games I've played. One thing that really stands out to me, as a 21:9 monitor user, is that the FOV seems to be vertical- rather than horizontal+. This means that everything--especially the region map, is more zoomed in than is really comfortable. Other than that, I don't like how limited building placement is (e.g., farms only allowed in very small, specific tiles), how houses all appear the same (and at the same orientation by default), how roads don't intersect smoothly, the number of spelling and grammatical errors in the text (sometimes serious enough to make it incomprehensible), and the overall sloppiness of the interface.

I'm not saying this will be a bad game when it releases, but based on the prologue, there's a long way to go.

* Edit 4/7/2020: Another patch, still no fixes for the games worst problems. I had hope for this one since they mentioned something about improving path construction, but the changes they made are ultimately inconsequential. And they now have the gall to trot out a bunch of overpriced DLC while the base game is still broken. DEAR DEVS: FIX THE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ PATH AND TERRAIN TOOLS. They are absolutely vital for making the game function, and they are just painful to use.

I want to love this game, but it just has so many problems that I can't recommend it unless you're only buying it for sandbox mode. At this time I consider franchise, challenge, and to a certain extent, career mode to be functionally unplayable. If these issues were all resolved, I think this game could have been sold at $60 and have been well worth the price.

Critical, game ruining issues:

* Guests will just refuse to use some facilities while swamping others. I put two bathrooms next to each other and one got 600 uses before the other got 30, even though the former was closer to the main path. This can cause your expenses to boom while guest satisfaction plummets. Absolutely infuriating.

* Guests will complain constantly about staff facilities even if they are completely hidden. There are all these nice assets that you can use to obfuscate undesirable sights, but they have no actual effect. It doesn't matter that my staff room is neatly nestled within an ornate palace or completely buried underground, the guests can just sense that it's nearby. They'll also complain about other inane things like not being able to get a good enough view of the animals, even as there are clear views all around the habitat with animals sitting inches away from guests.

* Animal reproduction and life-cycles micro-management is out of control. Put two cockroaches in an exhibit together and they'll be have 2 dozen offspring before the end of the day. The alternative is to spay/neuter them, but then you have to constantly buy/adopt new animals and you miss out on the potential profits from selling offspring. Oh, and you'll get popups from time to time about animal inbreeding....but who has the time to care? In a park with hundreds of animals, do they really expect the player to take the time to stop some flamingo from ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ his sister? The amount of time that this requires is absolutely ridiculous. In all but the smallest parks, it can very quickly feel like half of your play time is just spent managing this one issue. One simple solution to most of this (aside from elongating lifespans) would be to have some kind of population automanagement option--especially for exhibit animals--which automatically sends animals above a certain threshold to the trade center.

* The game is very, very bad at communicating why you're losing money and what your real sources of income are. Be prepared to have completely functional parks suddenly go into the red for no discernible reason.

* Editing terrain, water, and paths is just a nightmare. You must remove an entire body of water to make minor adjustments in terrain...and then you must remove any and all animals that were in that body of water before putting the water back. Trying to make a zoo with a river running through multiple habitats and is one of the most frustrating experiences I've had gaming in the last several years. By the same token, trying to make a simple sloped path or staircase up a change in elevation is nigh impossible. The simple solution would be to allow you to build the path/stairs first and then place terrain underneath to fill, but if you do that, the terrain forms weird gaps and spikes around the path that look just awful.

Really stupid, but not game ruining issues:

* Laying paths in general is still an absolute nightmare. This should have been the first thing to be fixed from Planet Coaster, but it still hasn't been addressed.

* You absolutely must micromanage staff by creating work areas or you will have a major overstaffing problem, leading to massive debt.

* Certain animals have really unrealistic habit requirements. This especially egregious in the case of temperate species. For example, Japanese Macaques do not live on the frozen tundra--their natural habitat is ranges from temperate to sub-tropical.

* Animals are way too particular about the contents of their enclosure. It makes sense for their to be certain requirements, but how much is a panda really going to care if some water lilies happen to be growing in their pond? This really restricts creativity.

* Guests sometimes have a tendency to all congregate in one area, even when there are multiple paths, leading to massive congestion.

* Research doesn't carry over from park to park in franchise and challenge mode, meaning that you have to start from scratch with research for every zoo. The big problem with this is that it really, really restricts what themes you can use to build your zoo until after a large portion of it is already built. This effectively means that you'll have go back and rebuild portions of each park after completing the corresponding research if you want to use a specific theme. The result of this system is that I usually start every park with like 1-2 completely basic habitats, 3-6 exhibit species, and a bunch of mechanics and just sit around waiting for them to research. After that, I bulldoze the entire park and start from scratch. This is a profoundly stupid waste of the player's time.

* The terraforming tools really need a higher speed setting. It takes painfully long to move large amounts of earth. The terrain editor also has weird and annoying interactions with preexisting paths and bodies of water.

* There is no way to tell where staff can and cannot walk within an exhibit. If you try to hide the staff entrance in a cave or something, 90% of the time you'll find out later that your animals are starving and dying of disease because the staff can't walk past a rock that's 1cm out of place. There is an overlay that lets you see where animals can and can't walk, so why not for staff? Meanwhile, guests will happily walk through decorations that you place on pathways.

* Habitats cannot have multiple staff entrances. Why? Why can't I have a crocodile habitat that straddles a river with staff entrances on both sides?