First up, i am lying, but 40 hours sound better than 38 hours 
TLDR: The game even it is current state is quite good, but it has some flaws, I would like to see fixed. I feel many people are unfarmiliar with the Strategy genre itself and don't know it takes time to see systems 'gel' with one another. Also I think it is quite normal that the successor is rougher in the first months than the DLC/expansion-filled predecessor.
The Coaster Kings:
The Munster Koach-DLC (The mid to mixed tier):
The vomit plagued ride, you never get to clean up (The downright bad tier)
- The Guestcount: Here i am with the elephant in the room. Your game wasn't so well received from the community as you liked, but why? You forgot or downright ignored how the game works, yes Chris Sawyer lay the groundworks for you, but since the RCT2 Addons you are there with the system, we all were familiar and loved and you just can't crank on pipe open to 11 and hope this works in a coherrent system. Scenario and Sandbox parks were you used to have 700-3000 peeps, hell you designed a lot of scenarios where the goal was to get 700 guests in the park. The base system was always the same, you try to lure customers in the park to get money, you spend this money for rides and research and overhead. You need to make a decision if you hire a new janitor or not, cause your overhead was really high. Even in PlanCo there was that one scenario where the park was run down, trashed and had a lot of shops sprawled around, the challenge was to improve the park, keep/get the guest count up and be in the black numbers. By overtuning the spawnrate of the game, you broke major parts of that system. There is no challenge if you get your 800 guests for your single tea-cup ride, but it creates a lot of issues and it shows.
- The UI-Design: yes, you heard it PC-Gamers doesn't like consoledesign, but i want to go deeper with it and also give you some pointers, and doing instructural design myself, i know there are some hard choices to be made, you can't please everyone. And i support your decision to some degree, that i rather have a bloated ui with many options (and a lot of creative power)
- Pricing/economy: For god's sake, what did you do to the pricing in the game. I get it, that the 'old' system was not good and not very transparent unless, you sank a lot of time in it and some new dynamic system is cool, but first i like more options: than min or max price. Maybe i just want +10% of the price. Get rid of the cumstom price and just give us a slider on Bargain +x%. Or go back that prices are more or less static: But the bargain price is way to abretary and has to large room: I am fine if a ride switches it bargain between 10 or 15%, but i see the same ride have a bargain price of 5 to 26 to 12 in one hour of gaming, How should i set a custom price there unless, i spent the whole hour clicking through my rides. Also i feel the prices are batsh** crazy: Two flat rides next to each other: One charges 5, the other 26, both have identical prestige. I feel you wanted to flatten out that every ride gets the same income on prestige/hour, but this is not 100% how the real world works. Capacity of rides is an important number in theme parks. Sometimes low capacity rides charge less than high capacity rides, this all feels like a very mad system.
- Here I am getting to a very subjective point of the game, but it was still a big let down for me: I was really looking forward to build a few of the 'hottest' rides that are on the coaster market: But neither a vekoma new gen Flying Coaster (F.L.Y.) nor any new Mack Coaster (Xtreme Spinner, Stryker, hell even Big Dipper: Time Traveler, Ride to Happiness, Voltron) are in the game. It also still doesn't have any real single rail coaster (either RMC nor Intamin) only the T-Rex, which doesn't exist yet in real life.
All in All you did a great Job in the game and i have the feeling you have made a worthy successor to your coaster series, but i feel that you again made some typical crowd issues you did at the start of every single of your main titles (RCT 3 pre-soaked, Planet Coaster release), if this is a mark of things to come, since you always managed to turn things around so far, I am more than happy and hopefully, that i have a new game in my beloved amuesment park-sim franchise. =)
Thank you for your amazing work and keep it up so far.
TLDR: The game even it is current state is quite good, but it has some flaws, I would like to see fixed. I feel many people are unfarmiliar with the Strategy genre itself and don't know it takes time to see systems 'gel' with one another. Also I think it is quite normal that the successor is rougher in the first months than the DLC/expansion-filled predecessor.
The Coaster Kings:
- I love the new themes, they feel fresh and original, I felt they old base themes: Fantasy, Western and Space are mostly overused and stale. Something I see in real life Theme Parks as well that they try to go many other ways, when they open a new 'land'...The thing i personally loved the most, that this helped me, evolve as a PlanCoBuilder. My go-to-safe space assets are gone (and i truly miss my spooky DLC assets) and i had to rethink many situations, which freed a lot of creativity.
- Graphics: The lightning looks fantastic, Water in ponds and pools really looks great. I love it that you make use of the powerful graphics combined with better performance than the first title. (item count/guest count vs. FPS you clearly improved your engine a lot, that this not a close discussion. Of course, we will see how it fares, if you add TMTK to it and so on, but right now performancewise you knocked the old engine out of the ball park.)
- Pathing: How powerful is the new pathing? It is everything a PC1 player/builder wanted to be and more. There is a learning curve to it, but once you master it, you are going to love it, even if you clicked yourself in a tough situation, you can edit the pathing your way. There are some hiccups down the road, but all in all the new tool is great. Here i feel you really listened to the PC1 'hardcore' base, cause i think everyone who sank more than 100 hrs in PC1 had some bad experience with the old pathing.
- Brush Tool: How many hours did i spent place a tree by hand, then place another, turn it a bit, etc.? Now one of the most tedious parts of PC1 got automated and i love it. It works 95% well all the times, so that your trees don't look placed, but have that chaotic natural feel to it.
- Shop/Ride-Selection: All in All, you did a good job, selecting the brands and adding new ones, if I compare both base games (and this is my expectation) I feel we got the better selection in 2. Classic mixed with new one. The same goes for rides and coasters, here i also feel you kept many popular and real life popular attraction in the game. So the overall selection is quite good.
- 'smarter' Building: you know have grid snap and better snapping, i love it. I feel i placed fewer things floating in mid air (unless i wanted it).
- Coaster Smoothness: Holy guacamole! Those Beasts run smooth, that you added the forward and backward option on smoothness simply shows, how much you care for your community. A longside with the brush tool, weird pathing you simply killed three major timesinks. For this I am grateful, especially the 4 by 4 smoothing method, was a dull timesink, which actively kept me away from playing the game. My mind was literally: "Cool let's build a new coaster maybe a stall over a little pond as main element? Or some twisted turns on a cliff? Tunnelsection?" - "Nah, we have to spend hours smooth that thing over and over, let's rather clean the dishes that is more productive fun"
The Munster Koach-DLC (The mid to mixed tier):
- Electricity, Water: Though i like the challenge not to totally bomb your scenery rating with it and it leads to some tough decision, where to place it since most the scenary heavy and reliant parts actually need power, i still feel from the management side of thing, it feels not very good, more like a chore, but you don't have any good situation, where you feel you are doing right.
- Mechanics: Are my new security guards, i really hated the security feature in Planet Coaster, cause you were only trying to keep the chaos at minimum, but i never got the feeling: "Damn, I got it right and the thing is so rewarding." This is how i feel at mechanics at the moment, you are only able to hold hell at bay and not thrive with it.
- Food preferences: This system feels half cooked and in many ways, actually to an extent where i don't care about. Maybe it prevents me from spamming Chief Beef through my park, but i never was that guy and i always tried to get a lot of variety in my food courts.
- Guest ride tolerances: I am not talking about the nausearating, but the actually: speed, g-force, height rating, maybe it was just me, but i really feel those things are waaaaaaaaaay to high, maybe it is just me (a guy who leans more on a realistic design) but i never have a ride that pulls 8G or gets 140m tall. Also i feel you have here two systems that do the same thing: ENF and tolerances. So this system feels a bit redudant.
- Chairoplane/Grand Caroussel is DLC: I am ok with the first day DLC, what i am not ok with is that you locked every classic ride and park staple behind the DLC. Chairoplane or Caroussels are often used as landmark / entrance ride. The ride you see, when you walk in the park. Here i feel the base game really lacks this option, especially since Tea-Cups, which may have a similar vibe to it, have this really large footprint to place. We need more family/kidfriendly rides in the base game.
- Research: I don't like the research as a progress bar in career-mode, it doesn't challenge me, so i keep spamming the same rides over and over. Also it is not a very engaging system.
The vomit plagued ride, you never get to clean up (The downright bad tier)
- The Guestcount: Here i am with the elephant in the room. Your game wasn't so well received from the community as you liked, but why? You forgot or downright ignored how the game works, yes Chris Sawyer lay the groundworks for you, but since the RCT2 Addons you are there with the system, we all were familiar and loved and you just can't crank on pipe open to 11 and hope this works in a coherrent system. Scenario and Sandbox parks were you used to have 700-3000 peeps, hell you designed a lot of scenarios where the goal was to get 700 guests in the park. The base system was always the same, you try to lure customers in the park to get money, you spend this money for rides and research and overhead. You need to make a decision if you hire a new janitor or not, cause your overhead was really high. Even in PlanCo there was that one scenario where the park was run down, trashed and had a lot of shops sprawled around, the challenge was to improve the park, keep/get the guest count up and be in the black numbers. By overtuning the spawnrate of the game, you broke major parts of that system. There is no challenge if you get your 800 guests for your single tea-cup ride, but it creates a lot of issues and it shows.
- The Queue-Bug: Not directly connected to the guestcount but it adds to it: Guests are afraid to queue longer than 1-2 cycles at most rides, so the big queuelines, everyone loved and added to a realistic park feel are useless, i can save space and money, if i just put up a 20m line.
- Parks get overcrowded fast: not just sandbox parks, no your own scenarios tend to have this issue a lot, you sometimes placed 4 or 8m queue, but since everybody is running around an no one queues, there are lot of chokepoints, some are player fixable, some are not. But i never got the feeling that the challenge of the scenario was to fix the bad infrastructure, especially this bad design shows in your early missions a lot, which keeps players from playing.
- Money is a no issue: With that amount of peeps all rides/shops are at max capacity, i feel often there is money generated out of thin air.
- You killed your design space: Overcrowded is overcrowded, i don't feel a challenge to pull large numbers, so if you ever planed on Hotels / Restaurant / Crowdpullers, there is nothing to it
- The UI-Design: yes, you heard it PC-Gamers doesn't like consoledesign, but i want to go deeper with it and also give you some pointers, and doing instructural design myself, i know there are some hard choices to be made, you can't please everyone. And i support your decision to some degree, that i rather have a bloated ui with many options (and a lot of creative power)
- Bad Presets: I feel the UI gets a lot of hate cause it is counterintuitive but also you made a lot of bad choices on the default settings: the graphics, the collision, the pathing, the brush tool many things have bad presets, which generates a lot of crying out loud. I for my part don't hate the ui that much anymore, unless i discover where things are not saved (as my default, where i cry to myself 'why?').
- Saving settings: Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't: The colorschemes and recent colors aren't saved so every time i want to pick old colors the recent is gone, when i pick a diffrent wall i have to repaint it first. The grid most of the times changes back to 4x4, even if that building uses 1x0,25 pieces. I want to assign a staff member to a specific ride, my filters are gone. etc. etc.
- Consistency: From language: some times you talk about ignore then you use the term avoid. Some terms aren't 100% clear what is a working height, and so on (see below). Your menus are badly categorized and there are a lot issues, sometimes there is a arc under arcs, sometime it is in decoration, resort trim are under '...', coaster supports is just an empty menu and those are things just on top of my head and sorry, i am not reporting this specific issues, that is a job for a paid qa team not a customer. (especially it gets tedious)
- Tooltips: Working height, Snaping so and so, please use simple hover tooltips that explains those settings cause sometimes i am baffled, what some terms mean, many i get by experimenting, some i never get or 30 hours into the game
- Pricing/economy: For god's sake, what did you do to the pricing in the game. I get it, that the 'old' system was not good and not very transparent unless, you sank a lot of time in it and some new dynamic system is cool, but first i like more options: than min or max price. Maybe i just want +10% of the price. Get rid of the cumstom price and just give us a slider on Bargain +x%. Or go back that prices are more or less static: But the bargain price is way to abretary and has to large room: I am fine if a ride switches it bargain between 10 or 15%, but i see the same ride have a bargain price of 5 to 26 to 12 in one hour of gaming, How should i set a custom price there unless, i spent the whole hour clicking through my rides. Also i feel the prices are batsh** crazy: Two flat rides next to each other: One charges 5, the other 26, both have identical prestige. I feel you wanted to flatten out that every ride gets the same income on prestige/hour, but this is not 100% how the real world works. Capacity of rides is an important number in theme parks. Sometimes low capacity rides charge less than high capacity rides, this all feels like a very mad system.
- Here I am getting to a very subjective point of the game, but it was still a big let down for me: I was really looking forward to build a few of the 'hottest' rides that are on the coaster market: But neither a vekoma new gen Flying Coaster (F.L.Y.) nor any new Mack Coaster (Xtreme Spinner, Stryker, hell even Big Dipper: Time Traveler, Ride to Happiness, Voltron) are in the game. It also still doesn't have any real single rail coaster (either RMC nor Intamin) only the T-Rex, which doesn't exist yet in real life.
All in All you did a great Job in the game and i have the feeling you have made a worthy successor to your coaster series, but i feel that you again made some typical crowd issues you did at the start of every single of your main titles (RCT 3 pre-soaked, Planet Coaster release), if this is a mark of things to come, since you always managed to turn things around so far, I am more than happy and hopefully, that i have a new game in my beloved amuesment park-sim franchise. =)
Thank you for your amazing work and keep it up so far.
