Before I start, I have some embarrassing stats with Frontier sims:

Planet Coaster: 1,174.7 hours

Planet Zoo: 76.5 hours

Jurassic World Evolution: 62.7 hours

Clearly, I’ve enjoyed Planet Coaster the most. Planet Zoo just wasn’t my thing, but I don’t feel like I wasted my money as it’s well done. Jurassic World was fun but lacked depth; however, it was worth it as I had fun and played with dirty dinos.

When this game came up for preorder, I purchased the best bundle to support one of my favorite devs and was so excited. I love Planet Coaster—it’s my go-to when I’ve got nothing to do, don’t want to dive into something deep, and want to chill.

I’m currently at 46 hours into this game and I just can’t recommend it. Every time I log in, hoping to build a cool coaster and expand my park, I end up hating the game even more.

Before I dive into the bad, let’s start with some of the good. The graphics are much better, coaster building is much better, and the ideas from a management perspective for shops, staff, and restaurants are good.

But that’s it. The execution is just bad. Why manage anything? It’s so difficult, broken, or pointless that I don’t even care to try anymore. I love the management part of running a theme park. It’s so hard to do here and whats the point? The one vegan that comes to my park can't eat a burger? It matters so little, that it might as well just be plan-co one. It didn't need this and serves no purpose. I hate it, truly, and for the first time in my life, I want to play sandbox mode, which is just not fun to me as I’m not a designer. That’s what the workshop is for.

So let’s talk about that disaster. They had the workshop, and it worked good enough. This? OMG, this. Don’t dare try to find a specific ride type or scenery type—you just see everything. There’s always a delay on the pages that show you six items at a time. It’s forcing me to build everything. I don’t always want to spend 30 hours working on a flat ride. Sometimes I want to integrate other people’s amazing creativity into my parks. Well, **** me, right, Frontier? At least you can control it? Or... I don’t know why this was even part of the dev time on a very broken and incomplete game.

Then there’s the AI. How this is so bad is unbelievable to me. Just understand you’ll be picking people up and moving them around constantly. Your staff barely comprehends zones, and people get stuck on everything or can’t find the exit while standing right next to it.

And the menus. Glad you prioritized consoles and gave us the finger. This is so unbearable and frustrating to use that again, I hate it even more every time I try. That being said, the water slides are also a raging pile of ****—from the weird animations, super speed, and general lack customization. Why do I have to build these like I'm playing RCT3, except that worked and wasn't weird.

I can’t for the life of me understand what happened here, but it feels like a quick end-of-year cash grab, which of course it was, with the most ludicrous DLC I’ve ever seen for this series. Keep in mind, I bought the Ghostbusters DLC for Planet Coaster the day it came out and was fine with it. It’s cool that their bad earning call has them motivated to try and rebuild some trust and positive feelings, but right now there is none, and based on their roadmap, we won’t see any real change until updates that current have no plan. It’s just bug fixes and a “free” flat ride that should have been included in the first place because they stripped tons of content that was included in the first game.

I’ve uninstalled and may never be back. I’m hoping they can fix this so I can feel better about my purchase, but I will never trust to buy a day-one product from Frontier again. I can only assume Jurassic World Evolution 3 will suffer the same consequences. I can promise you, I no longer care at all about that game anymore either or really anything from them. But comment on my negative posts and tell me you hear me while you have to hotfix the game because it still crashes all the time. Ya, that's still a thing as well. But maybe this hotfix will work.

Total rip off. Why in hell should I pay for items already in 1st version. If I new this I would not have preorded or purchased it.

I'd avoid until 1.0 is released