Anyone who's ever stepped off of a roller coaster with a huge grin and an idea for a ride of their own will appreciate the immense appeal of Coaster Creator 3D's concept. It combines the classic video game experience of going really fast with the medium's unique ability to let you do things you wouldn't necessarily be able to in real life — namely, design and ride your own roller coasters. It's a winning formula, equal parts puzzle game and sandbox, and even with its confusing interface and somewhat bland presentation, creative coaster-lovers will get a real kick out of Coaster Creator 3D.
Coaster Creator's Career mode is where new players will spend their first few rounds around the track, and features twenty challenge levels to complete. As coaster building apprentices at Classic Coasters, players are given rides in various states of completion to tinker with and objectives to complete. You might need to spice up an old wooden roller coaster with dips and turns, modify a track's path so that it hits specific areas or speed targets, or take loop-de-loops out of a coaster to make it suitable for the virtual children you'll soon send screaming down the track. Many of these challenges have some sort of restriction — like only being able to remove track — that turn them from design tasks into proper puzzles, and make it incredible satisfying to come up with a winning plan. Once you think you've got your coaster ready, you can take it on a virtual test ride to see if it passes muster.
Challenges generally take about five to ten minutes apiece, though you can easily spend much longer perfecting a ride and there's always more than one way to solve a puzzle. And while there's no hands-on 'tutorial' as such, the initial Career challenges do a good job of introducing you to the different features of the track editor one by one. They don't necessarily do the best job of explaining how to use those tools, however, so this is one game where the excellent manual and in-game help are pretty much required reading.
As you complete the Career challenges, you'll unlock cart and track styles, attachments, decals, and new themed areas that you can use in the game's Sandbox mode — and while the challenges are good fun, the Sandbox is where Coaster Creator really gets going. In this mode, your sole objective is to envision, build, and tweak the coolest coasters you can think of to your heart's content. There are a few sample tracks to get you started, and you can use any of the coasters you've cleared in the Career challenges as templates, but the real fun comes from starting from scratch.
After picking a lifter style and height (for the coaster's initial climb) and sketching in a rough track outline, you're ready to go. All the editing options are open in this mode with no restrictions, so any twist, curve, or bump in the track you can imagine is fair game. You can create corkscrews and loop-de-loops, dips and rises, banked turns and downhill dives, and there's a super helpful Track Wizard tool that lets you add common track embellishments using prose instead of precision editing — "double loop here" or "corkscrew to the right here". It makes things much simpler, and we had the most fun starting with these options and tweaking them from there. For manual adjustments, you can set the 'brush size' from one to five, which changes how many pieces of track your stylus affects at a time.
Beyond designing the layout for your coaster, there's plenty you can do to customize the tracks and cars themselves. There are several different types of track and cart styles, a whopping sixty-four colour options for cars, seats, track and support posts, and plenty of decals and unlockable extras. Want to have the front of your car decked out in a lucha libre mask, or look like a giant insect head? Done and done. And though the focus is definitely on the coasters themselves, you can also do some light park customization to help give each ride its own unique feel. There are tons of interesting objects that you can place around your track, from volcanoes and bouncy castles to Aztec statues, but certain items are sadly restricted to coasters in their own thematic areas.
Of course, as in the Career mode, half the fun comes from taking your Sandbox designs out for a spin. There's a wealth of options for enjoying your ride, including several different camera angles and the ability to skip right to the top of the lifter for instant gratification. You can even pick which seat to sit in for the in-the-car view — real-life coasters feel different from the front to the back, after all, and it's great that your virtual ones can, too. Another neat feature is being able to look around from the cart view using the 3DS' gyroscope, by holding down the R button and moving the system.
Riding your coasters around is gratifying enough, but it's even more fun to put them through their paces in Star Roller, a fun mini-game that uses your creations as its courses. You blast through three laps around a tracks, using the D-pad or Circle Pad to move a hand above your coaster to either the left, top, or right positions to try and catch stars littered along the way. There are also left and right arrows that appear from time to time, requiring timely presses of the L or R buttons to pass. It's simple but lots of fun, reminding us quite a bit of bonus stages from the Sonic the Hedgehog series, and it adds an appealing interactive element to riding your creations.
Finally, one of Coaster Creator 3D's most exciting features is the ability to export your creations as QR codes, and to scan codes generated by others to import their tracks. This adds a huge amount of potential reply value - you can ride and Star Roll around imported tracks just like any other saved coaster, and provided you've cleared the necessary Career challenges, you can edit them as well.
Coaster Creator 3D is a surprisingly powerful coaster-building tool, and a fun game, but it's not without its flaws. Our biggest problem with Coaster Creator comes from the editing interface itself, and while that's not the deal-breaker that it sounds like, it can still be frustrating. The main issue is that coaster building is split between a 3D view on the top screen, and a 2D diagrammatic representation of the track on the bottom screen. Since you use the stylus to edit your creations, you'll be manipulating the coaster — a three-dimensional task - entirely on the bottom screen, with its two-dimensional view.
This is done by adjusting the viewing angle of the bottom screen's camera using the D-pad. To move the track along the X or Y axes, for instance, you'll need to position the camera at a bird's-eye view. To raise or lower the track along the Z axis, you'll move the camera to a side view. That makes sense, but the bottom screen's camera moves independently from the top screen's, which is controlled with the Circle Pad. It's much more intuitive to look at what's going on with the actual roller coaster up top while editing, but you'll need to ensure sure both cameras are synced up at approximately the same angle manually — the game won't do it for you. When they're out of sync, it leads to wildly unintuitive situations where pulling the stylus one way pushes your track in the opposite direction. That said, once you get past the editor's interface quirks, there's quite a lot of powerful coaster customization at your disposal, and playing around building tracks is still a great time.
Coaster Creator 3D's visual presentation is colourful and fun, even if it's not really out to impress on a technical level. There are some nice touches, such as the lively facial expressions on the Mii-like riders, but the graphics can feel somewhat generic. As you'd expect, zooming around a roller coaster in stereoscopic 3D is a blast, but that effect is marred here by a substantial frame-rate hit — you'll get a much better sense of speed with the 3D off, which is disappointing. The soundtrack, however, is a great fit for the attraction-building action — it's relaxing and catchy, but stays in the background enough that it doesn't grate during extended editing sessions.
Conclusion
It starts with a steep learning curve, the interface can be creaky, and it's not the prettiest attraction around; but there's still plenty of creative fun to be found in this capable coaster creator. Swapping designs with others using QR codes adds a ton of replay value, as does the Star Roller mode, and the simple act of creating and riding your own coasters is as enjoyable as ever. It's obvious that someone at Big John Games really loves roller coasters, and like-minded players will definitely enjoy their ride with Coaster Creator 3D.
Comments 28
I might get this in the future, glad I waited for a review of the game first, now me and my clones (And not just the Shadow/Back up Anthony's) will all go ride a super, crazy coaster that I make.
I kept saying in the comments that this game seemed, from the trailers, to have a good potential and a high risk of ruining it; really glad to read the developpers didn't waste it at the end
I will surely consider to buy it when/if it will come in Europe, hoping it won't arrive at the same time of one of the lots of major titles that are on the way here ^_^;
I was a huge fan of Roller Coaster Tycoon back in the day. This game may not be in the same general idea as that one, but the idea of roller coasters has me interested.
If the 3DS eShop didn't have enough titles I have to get, I would consider this one.
This scored a bit higher than I thought it would...
Still not buying it though.
@Morgan Why does it always seem like you're the one stuck reviewing the less desirable games? Haha...
I'm really tempted to buy this now , because I was waiting on a review.
I create a simple web page to gather and share QR codes for the custom tracks people create. The site has been announced by Big John Games on their Facebook page, but I'll go ahead link to the site directly for anyone who is interested.
http://www.coastercreator3dqrcodes.blogspot.com
After the disappointment of Roller Coaster Tycoon 3D, I might get this. I always thought it would be cool to ride rollercoasters on 3DS! Can Miis ride your coasters?
The game looks great and great review! Wouldn't it be neat if you could make your own coasters or a full Theme Park. Then open your gates to online buddies who could walk around the Park you made and go on your rides? Possible or no? Would be cool with a game such as this if they could create an online environment with some sort of way to earn tickets to go on Certain Rides. Sounds cool to me kinda of like the Old disney Magic Key Tickets. Also walk around someones park with your Mii avatar would be cool with a bubble chat. Dev's just don't seem like they want to do any online co-op in the Eshop ADDON: just thought of this you could use your coins you get from system on 3DS
I'm going to pick this up at some point. I love stuff like this. Trackmania was kinda like creating Roller Coasters I bet it's real similar.
higher score than i expected...nice review, but a definate non-buy for me
Wow.I thought this would suck at first because the screenshots made it look lackluster.
I was waiting for a good roller coaster game to hit, so I was holding out to see what else it had to offer. Now that I know, I'm getting it right now.
@zipmon
Have you played Roller Coaster Tycoon 3D?
hm maybe this can fullfill my rollercoastertycoon-needs when i dont wnat to sit in front of the pc
Nice I was expecting you guys to give it a 7, I like it a lot, pretty much no limits on sandbox
Oh wow, I was expecting it to be terrible like almost every other console rollercoaster/theme park builder.
@Windy I'd love something like you described.
Spot on review!! The interface is indeed somewhat confusing and the presentation is a little bland but otherwise it's a ton of fun to play. Dispite being way too addicted to Etrian Odyssey, Coaster Creator 3D has managed to pull me away from it multiple times and I've not regreted one bit the time I've spent playing it or the money I spent to buy it.
If you like rollercoaster game/ building rollercoasters then I highly recomend this game. Personally I can't wait to see people's creations. I'm sure some of us out there will start trying to build some real coasters in the game.
The career/puzzle mode sounds neat. I figured this was just going to be a sandbox game.
Nice review
Had this scored just a few points less, I'm sure I would've read the word "shovelware" six or seven times scrolling through the comments...
@chewytapeworm It's far from shovelware as I've played a couple of those in my life......cough Horizons cough
However, it's probably not a game for everyone. It's a puzzle/sandbox/creative game. If you don't enjoy all of those aspects combined with rollercoasters then you should probably just move on to the next game that does interest you. However if you do enjoy those elements it's a great game and I see myself going back to it time and time again as opposed to some games that just sit there on my system.
This game is really fun once you figure out the track editing controls. I have a problem with it crashing my 3DS when I try a test run on challenges, but these guys are awesome and have said they already have a fix submitted to Nintendo. Great game!
@gomez: I'm the Lead Developer for Coaster Creator. We're aware of the crashing issues, and a fix has been submitted to Nintendo, which will hopefully be approved and available soon.
In the meantime, please see the post I wrote in the Coaster Creator impressions thread in the forums for details on the problem and a workaround to prevent the crashes:
https://www.nintendolife.com/forums/eshop/coaster_creator_3d_is_coming_on_feburary_28th
edit: posted before I saw gomez's edit to his own post. Anyone experiencing a crash, please see the linked discussion.
@Chriiis It's a bummer but for some reason Devs are hung up on doing streetpass instead of online Co-op these days. Maybe eventually North America will catch up on the streetpass. From what I hear streetpass is wonderous in Japan. a Themepark game with online visiting and socialising would be such a cool thing
@Rod64 I actually haven't! This was the first time I spent any real time with a roller coaster game, and I was pleasantly surprised at how well the experience translates to the small screen!
@Barbiegurl777 I totally agree, the first level was far and away the hardest for me too!
Hmmmmm...nah.
is this coming out in England? I would buy this.
@Arkaein
AWESOME! You were part of this game! Incredible! I gave this a 5 stars on the eShop.
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