The king of theme park management sims is here. It’s not some godawful spin-off that bears the name but none of the fun, it’s not the great-but-not-as-good-as-the-first-two RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, this is the first and second games in the series stitched together and bundled with some modern quality-of-life features, such as speeding up time, which is a godsend. This is Rollercoaster Tycoon Classic on Switch, and expectations are lofty.

If you’re unfamiliar with the premise, you’re given a plot of land or an existing theme park and a goal to reach; it might be housing a certain number of guests, achieving a high park value, or perhaps even paying off a debt that someone incurred by not charging for anything.

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Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

The way to do any of these is largely the same: create a big, elaborate, exciting, and profitable theme park filled with freefall launchers, merry-go-rounds, refreshment stalls, and of course rollercoasters. Despite its vintage, RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic absolutely slaughters the competition with its flexibility, simple-yet-powerful design controls, visuals that – whilst technically dated – look stunning, and bags of charm.

The game comes with a whopping 95 scenarios for you to tackle, and that doesn’t even include the 43 ‘extra parks’ found in the menu selection of the same name. These are all but a handful of the scenarios from RollerCoaster Tycoon and its immediate sequel, plus all of the expansion packs that were released for them over 20 years ago. The only omissions are some of the ‘real parks’ that we’re assuming developer Chris Sawyer and publisher Atari weren’t able or willing to renew the rights to. Alton Towers was never our favourite, so we can live without it.

The scenarios are as strong and varied as they ever were, but this souped-up version includes some small changes such as additional scenery in previously barren parks, mostly thanks to the (at the time) new additions from RollerCoaster Tycoon 2.

Also from that sequel is the Designer, a workspace that allows you to create your own custom roller coaster designs free of the stresses and finances of a scenario, and with the ability to save your rides so you can plop them into the real game whenever you fancy. Unlike other versions of the game, the scenario side of the toolkit is missing, meaning you can't create custom parks, or indeed share them with your friends, which is a bit of a blow. This could be a result of the .sc6 file import and export system not aligning with Nintendo’s locked-down approach to their console, but it would’ve been nice to see it in some form rather than being entirely gutted.

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Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

So it’s all largely what you’d expect, except the UI has had a total overhaul, and this is where we get into the weeds of the Switch version specifically. Visually things are different, that much is immediately obvious, but changing the controls from mouse and keyboard to a twin-stick layout is never a straightforward task. As it happens, the porting team at Graphite Lab has put some serious thought into how the Switch version handles.

You will be moving a cursor around with the left stick, which may initially sound like a solution that doesn’t fall in line with what we just said, but the reality is that there’s no elegant way to get around the fact that the whole game was designed with a cursor in mind, and stripping that away would only diminish things or remove flexibility. Well, there is one way, but we’ll get onto that later.

Various mode switches and shortcut keys make the whole experience a lot smoother than it could be, jumping between the different path tiles and track pieces, rotating what needs rotating, you can do it all and more without ever having to rely on the in-game cursor more than one or twice. It takes a little bit of getting used to, and these shortcuts are somewhat hidden in the options menu, but once you’ve got them down, it might be one of the most comfortable ways we’ve built custom roller coasters to date.

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Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

Having said that, there are still some small nuisances with the controls. The map, for example, is in the top right corner and has no shortcut associated with it as far as we can tell, despite inputs such as clicking the right stick going unused. Instead, you have to move the in-game cursor slowly over to the appropriate corner, and there’s no adjustment for how quickly it moves. Don’t get us wrong, as far as moving a cursor with the left stick goes, it’s dead smooth and we’re not sure we’ve ever mis-selected something that wouldn’t be just as tricky with a real mouse, but some flexibility in the options to change how fast it moves would’ve been nice.

The game also runs rather well… provided you don’t zoom out at all. For some reason at the ‘standard’ zoom level the game runs perfectly acceptably, dropping frames in busier scenes, but given the nature of the game, it’s never something that really affected enjoyment. Zoom out, on the other hand, and suddenly the game starts to really struggle, and panning the camera only makes things worse.

Given that the original games could run on a machine as powerful as a wet flannel, it’s disappointing to see the frame rate take such a dive in these instances. You don’t even need to be in a busy park, the initial Forest Frontiers scenario with nothing added is choppy as all hell when panning around and zoomed out. What’s even more bizarre is that our console didn’t seem to be struggling in a similar manner, the fan remained whisper quiet.

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Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

It’s very unclear why the performance tanks quite so much, but in truth you’re not likely to be spending much time at anything other than the default zoom level. Whilst it doesn’t really affect gameplay in any significant sense, it is still disappointing to see such an old game getting frame rates in the single digits in certain instances.

Another strange omission is that RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic doesn’t support touch controls on Switch. Given that the original release back in 2016 was exclusive to smart devices, we’re frankly agog that this functionality hasn’t made its way to Nintendo’s touchscreen-toting hybrid. It’s not a dealbreaker by any means, and the quick, sleek controller inputs make for a seriously pleasant time on the big screen, but the touchscreen is right there in handheld mode, and with an interface designed with touch controls in mind, it’s baffling that such a function is not present on Switch.

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Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

We’d really like to see these issues addressed in a future update, but if we’re being brutally honest, once we were deep into Diamond Heights upping the ride fee for Arachnophobia and slapping together a custom Looping Roller Coaster with an excitement rating of over 7 and making absolute bank off the hapless tiny guests we’d lured in, we stopped caring about those minor inconveniences completely.

Conclusion

RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic maintains its crown as the lord of all theme park management sims. Despite not supporting touchscreen inputs at all for some bizarre reason, and sudden performance dips when zooming out, the move to Nintendo Switch is a great one. With smartly designed controls and that timeless RCT gameplay (vertical) loop (right) completely intact, the best way to play this classic in your living room TV might, ironically, be Nintendo’s handheld hybrid.