Hello everybody and welcome back to another Timely Review. We’ve covered three Chris Sawyer games in the past little bit of time as part of a little series of reviews, but it comes to a close now (RCT2, OpenTTD, Locomotion). For the final review in this series, we’re taking a look at RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, where the franchise took the final big jump to 3D that was inevitably going to happen.

Unlike the past three reviews, Chris Sawyer had no direct involvement with actually designing the game. Instead, the rights to design the game were given to Frontier Designs, who previously designed the two expansion packs for RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, and weirdly enough, also designed an Xbox port of the original RollerCoaster Tycoon around the same time. During the time Frontier was designing RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, Sawyer was off designing Chris Sawyer’s Locomotion. That game attracted a small fanbase, but ultimately wasn’t very well received by critics because it came out too late. This caused Chris Sawyer to pretty much drop off the face of the Earth, unless he went back to develop RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic and the Transport Tycoon mobile port. This resulted in ownership of the franchise changing hands quite a bit.

RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 has a very odd history of reception. Upon its 2004 release, it received mixed reviews, and whilst the game still attracted a fanbase, it received a lot of negative reception from fans of the previous two games and for a while, it was seen as the black sheep of the franchise. This wasn’t helped by the fact that it was common for computers back then to have a lot of trouble running the game. Quite like Chris Sawyer’s Locomotion, reception for this game had gradually become more and more positive as time went on and is nowadays generally regarded as a pretty good, but flawed follow-up to Chris Sawyer’s games in the series. I can’t pinpoint an exact cause, but I estimate that this is a combination of later theme park games receiving scathing negative reception, computers being able to run the game better than they could 20 years ago, and people just generally realizing that the game isn’t that bad. This is incidentally two cases in a row of games just needing time before they finally saw justice.

Even though the game didn’t receive as much positivity as the previous two games, the game still received two expansion packs just like those two did. Unlike the previous two games, though, these expansion packs did change things up quite radically. Soaked allowed people to essentially build water parks in the middle of their theme parks, and Wild allowed people to build zoos in the middle of their theme parks. Put them all together, and you can make an insane zoo/water park/theme park hybrid. Shortly afterwards, this was followed by RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 Platinum Edition, which included both expansion packs in 2006. In 2020, a modernized port of this called RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 Complete Edition was digitally distributed.

RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 wouldn’t be Frontier’s final development in theme park games. They would later release Thrillville and Thrillville: Off the Rails in 2006 and 2007 respectively, which are both games that are more-so focused on playing fun minigames and generally goofing off rather than actual park management, but I remember having a lot of fun with both of those games in my childhood and early teenage years. 2013 would see them take another crack at zoo games with Zoo Tycoon, launching as an Xbox One launch title with mixed reception. In 2016, they returned to the theme park game genre once again to release Planet Coaster, which would be followed up by Planet Zoo in 2019 (incidentally being a spiritual successor of sorts to the Wild expansion pack) and more recently released Planet Coaster 2 in 2024. Frontier has a long history of theme park and zoo games, and now we’re taking a look at what their first proper game in that genre was.

Third Game, Third Dimension


If RCT3 is in 3D, does that mean RCT4 is in 4D?

We can’t really talk about RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 without talking about the biggest elephant in the room: The 3D graphics. On a technological level, the jump to 3D graphics is huge, and no longer being restricted to isometric viewpoints means that you can appreciate your park from every possible angle now. This makes building anything a little bit easier, since awkward viewpoints messing up your building is no longer a problem. Granted, this never happened frequently in the isometric games, but it could still occasionally come up every now and then, especially when building scenery. No more!

These 3D graphics also provide a stunning new feature (for its time), which is the ability to ride the rides. This is a really fun thing to do to pass the time if nothing major is happening in the park. That said, the jump to 3D is a bit of a double-edged sword because while it generally makes the game look more modern and allows for more building angles, the game also shows its age quite a bit and the primitive-looking 3D character models have not aged as well as Simon Foster’s sprite designs of the isometric games. This is particularly easy to spot when riding the rides, as you’ll come in contact with all the textures and guests much more closely.

Adding a whole new dimension also means a few parts of the building process have changed. Notable is the fact that terrain manipulation can now be done freeform instead of the tile-by-tile method of the isometric games, although you can still use that method if it’s easier for you. In spite of the added freedom with altering the landscape, every aspect of placing paths and rides is still bound by the tile system of the previous two games. On its own, this doesn’t really mean much, but when you try to combine the two systems together, there are unfortunately some very janky interactions, unfortunately very prominent when trying to place paths and stalls. Look at this:

If you were to try to connect paths 1 and 2 together, you’d just build one staircase off to the right. Isn’t that… right? That would be ideal except for the way the tile-laid path interacts with the flexible terrain means that trying to connect paths and stalls to them is sometimes a massive chore and instead of taking the simple route from path 1 to path 2, I needed to build a stupid roundabout to connect to the other side. Oftentimes, the game will refuse to allow you to place something where you want to with no obvious reason why, and the game doesn't always tell you what the problem is. There were a fair number of times when I placed a stall and couldn’t tell if it actually connected to the path or not, requiring me to retry until I eventually connected it in a way that was obvious.

Wondrous, Wild, and Sometimes a Bit Wet


We can't quite make the Cannonball Loop yet.

In addition to a whole new dimension also comes a number of other improvements. There are a lot of new rides in this game (more than the second game added), but not only is there simply more of them to build building them is also easier than it was before because of two VERY huge game-changers: The ability to build while the game is paused, and the ability to test rides in development with “ghost cars”. Both of these would later be featured in OpenRCT2, but it would be this game that would tag the leg up over the original releases in this regard. These two features are absolutely fantastic. No more needing to “eyeball it” when designing roller coasters with huge drops.

The two expansion packs, Soaked and Wild, are also even more content-oriented than the expansions of either of the first two games. These two don’t include as many scenarios as the expansions for the previous games, but it offers a lot more in extra other features, with the ability to build swimming pools with slides and zoos with all the proper management. Neither of these are as deep as dedicated games built around these concepts, but they’re really interesting additions that change the scope of the game dramatically and allow you to create some wacky hybrid parks.

The game is also even more customizable than the second game. It uses the same scenery building system as that game, but also includes the ability to create your firework show and billboards. I don’t particularly care much for either of these additions, but there’s definitely a lot of people who would absolutely sink several hours into building the perfect setup or fireworks or billboard art, and if you’re one of those people, then this is great news for you.

A new incredible feature that this game has over Chris Sawyer’s game is, for the first time ever, a proper sandbox mode. It also has the scenario editor from his games too, although the existence of sandbox mode renders it obsolete if all you want to do with it is… exactly what most people used it for in the previous games. It is still useful for people who want to make custom scenario packs, as some people do for RCT2.

The career mode of this game is… okay. Some parks are fun and interesting, some others are flat and boring. The different objectives are a neat concept, but the VIP objectives are shoddily executed and are sometimes a pain to get to work. The difficulty curve is still not as smooth as it was in the first game. The game changes the objectives up quite a bit by having three tiers of goals to achieve and only needing to complete the first tier to unlock the next park. While neat, some of the scenario goals are questionable, such as a Tier 3 goal requiring… $300 of ride profits over the course of one month.

Early 3D Weirdness


If any RCT3 veterans are reading this, please tell me if this toilet is connected to the path or not. I honestly don’t know.

So far, this game might sound like an almost strict upgrade over the second game, but that is definitely not the case. It received mixed reviews on launch compared to the smashing hits that the previous games were, so there’s got to be some shortcomings, right? Unfortunately, that is indeed true with RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, and I’m not just talking about the graphics not aging well or it being overly resource-intensive for its time. There are a number of downgrades compared to the isometric games.

One of the most major downsides of this game is that the UI has taken a massive downgrade compared to the first two games. Navigating the in-game menus is quite a bit clumsier than it was compared to those games. The button placement is often very unintuitive, and the icons don’t always line up with what you’d expect them to mean. Why the icon for Thrill Rides is in-between the ones for Gentle and Junior Rides (a new ride category in this game) is anyone’s guess. Instead of all occupying different tabs of the same menu, each ride category has its own separate menu, adding extra layers of clicking to get to where you need to go and adding unnecessary UI elements because each menu needs some place to access it. This also extends to the ride building UI, since there’s no obvious “build this” button that the other two games had. It’s the circle icon with the track piece itself, or also selecting the ride piece that’s already active.

I did mention previously that the tile based pathing in this game does not jive well with the more realistic terrain, but the more open-ended landscape altering tools are next to impossible to have any precision with which makes the pathing worse since it generally try to stick to the terrain wherever possible and when you’ve accidentally made a deep and oddly-shaped pit in the ground (and this will happen at least once if you try to do any terraforming), these two systems end up clashing with each other. The game also has an auto-tunneling feature, which is useful if you want to go underground deliberately, but is also a nuisance if you’re trying to conform to the landscape and not change it. And when a piece of that terrain is just a tiny bit different from the tile right next to it, getting the two to cooperate is a chore.

Additionally, there are a few tiny little things that aren’t significant by themselves, but do compound together to make a slightly less pleasant experience. First of which is the fact that your staff can now quit working on their own volition. You can raise their wages and their training to prevent this, but this now means that you have to remember to do a bunch of clicking and spend extra money for every staff member you place. Do you remember how handymen (or “janitors” as this game calls them) in the first game would mow the grass by default, and you needed to turn that off every single time? This is that problem but about 10 times worse. There have also been quite a number of times when I accidentally fired my staff members because the icon to do so doesn’t communicate this aspect through its art and unlike the isometric games, there’s no “are you sure” option to confirm your choice in case of a misclick.

Despite the fact that guests no longer look like carbon copies of each other with different shirts, the guests themselves have not really improved over the isometric games. The game includes a new “group” system, which is immersive, but often results in many of your guests waiting or meeting with their group instead of actually going on the rides. This means that your rides are often not as popular as they would’ve been in the previous two games, and in turn meaning that you don’t make as much money from those rides.

Speaking of the rides, why does every tracked ride in this game use all-black everything as its default color scheme? In the previous two games, each ride came with a variety of great default color schemes which often made your park look vibrant and alive even if you didn’t bother with much of the aesthetic customization, but every ride being black by default just looks weird and drab. I’m not trying to make a goth park here.

A Solid 3 Out of 3


This totally isn’t Dynamite Dunes, what are you talking about?

RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 is a good game. Even with the ability to pause the game and to "ghost-test" the rides mid-development (two things that would be featured in OpenRCT2), I can't say that it's as the first two due to its dated 3D graphics, dramatically downgraded interface, and the terrain not being super cooperative a lot of the time, but what was Frontier’s first full-fledged theme park game, they did a pretty good job all things considered. I didn’t play the game back then, so I can’t speak about the experience of playing the game when it was new, but on modern hardware, the game is more playable than ever. The jump that RollerCoaster Tycoon made to 3D was by no means perfect, and the game hasn’t aged anywhere near as gracefully as its isometric predecessors, but it’s still a worthwhile game to play for any tycoon fan. Not being as good as two of the most legendary PC games ever to be released is not a disappointment.

RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 can be bought in its Complete Edition package which contains both expansion packs on Steam, GOG, and Epic, or on the Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo stores. You can’t buy the 2006 Platinum Edition anymore, although you can still access its Steam page for some reason. The only real differences between the two versions is that the Complete Edition runs better on modern computers and removes all the Atari branding that was previously featured in all the other versions, although the Hershey branding (and the associated rides) that was added in the Soaked expansion pack still remains.

This however marks the end of my little miniseries of Timely Reviews of Chris Sawyer's games. I hope you enjoyed them, and maybe you've added a few new favorites to your collection. I'll see you all in my next review, whatever that may be because I don't know yet.

My Other Chris Sawyer Game Reviews