Roller coasters always represented both the ultimate thrill and the ultimate horror of my sporadic theme park experiences. As a kid, working up the nerve to conquer rides with ominous names like "The Monster," "Shockwave," and "Mind Eraser" always took a lot of effort, but the freak-out fun of getting my innards rattled at 70 mph through a loop-de-loop usually turned "gee, I don't know, guys" into "hell yes, let's go again!" I even remember getting together with friends, drawing up the craziest coaster ideas imaginable, and wondering if any real-world rides resembled my asinine blueprints. With its freeform, arcade-style gameplay that lets you build some truly insane coasters and then ride them in first-person, Roller Coaster Rampage indulges all my wildest childhood "what ifs."
Set within a sprawling amusement park, Roller Coaster Rampage is essentially an open-ended playground for dabbling in on-the-fly coaster creation. Instead of constructing tracks using a more technical editor-style interface, you direct your coaster around the park in real-time and the track builds itself out behind you. It's an inventive approach to coaster crafting that allows for some real artistry and intuition in the tracks you make. Dabbling around in the unrestricted Free Ride mode also has a cool Zen-like feel to it, and it's easy to get caught up in the flow of forging snaking tracks high above the park's scenic vistas.
Making coasters takes on a strong puzzle solving quality in the more focused campaign mode, which has you pulling off tricky maneuvers, chaining tracks together, and collecting colorful gems to earn the points needed to progress to tougher stages. Each of the numerous puzzle stages have some pre-laid out components that you can connect with to earn extra points as you zip around the park. Thankfully, there's still tons of freedom to experiment beyond the suggested routes. Working in and around the loose framework every levels throws at you is a neat challenge, and later stages really ramp up the craziness with more demanding goals and dynamic layouts.
Unlocking new stages requires creativity as you build out increasingly complex track full of corkscrews, loops, and other stunts to earn a good star rating before connecting back the starting gates. Unfortunately, controlling your speeding coaster is a far less intuitive process than designing tracks on-the-go. The WASD buttons control speed and banking while the directional keys handle vertical moves and turns. When you throw in a few other hard-to reach buttons on top of that, and the fact that tougher stages throw specific directions for you to follow at a faster and faster pace, pulling off quick maneuvers becomes an awkward pain. I may know exactly what kind of move I want to pull off, but the time it takes to fiddle with the controls to produce the desired result is often longer than the short window of opportunity provided to complete the trick. Though streamlined, the gameplay becomes demanding on later levels, and wrestling with the cumbersome keyboard controls doesn't mesh well with the fast paced action.
Semi-realistic physics are more of a consideration in the campaign challenges, but they too get in the way of the freeform fun at times. You have to tweak your speed constantly on some tracks in order to make it through big loops, stay on target to clear long-distance jumps, and keep from flying off the track on hairpin turns. Since artificially boosting your speed or braking consumes energy that's restored by collecting gems, it's hard to strike the right balance between juggling clever track design with the more practical need to keep your momentum and earns points. In later stages, keeping track of all these moving parts grows chaotic to the point of distraction, making spectacular derailments common. While they're amusing, these frequent wipeouts are more frustrating than funny when they kill an otherwise smooth high scoring run over and over again.
Source : ign[dot]com
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