I really wanted to have a positive view of this game, but it is very rough around the edges in a way that isn't just clunky but hinders my enjoyment of the game. It is a death by a thousand needles scenario where not just one thing is a big enough turn off to refund/stop playing but problems only pile up over the course of your playthrough. I played with a controller.
Problems:
Clunky Controls and Bad Building, the camera is only on a 4 axis system maintaining an isometric view across all angles which at first is neat but hinders the ability to interact with buildables SO MUCH. Items get stuck and overlap their hitboxes nearly every time two items are next to each other. The hitboxes for items are about twice as big as the item itself. Want to replace the food box you put in the corner of your exhibit? Too bad, you will be clicking the fence about twenty times and no amount of rotating the camera in only four directions will help. Say you do finally pick up your bench you wanted to move and wanted to place it one spot over, well you can't. The hitbox of the bench is still active and must be moved to a separate location to move it one over. And guess what, the floor goes with it too, which is just a dumb feature. meaning the original slot needs to be repaved, and the temporary location needs to be repaved. On top of that a handful of items can not be picked up and can only be repositioned via demolition, which has it's own set of problems. Mass demolition does not reimburse you, if you want your $8 back from the tree you must first manage to click on the tree, navigate to the demolition button, and confirm. At that point just keep my $8, the demolition selector tool also has a habit of randomly selecting a single object in your park to demolish, so if you are not careful enough you may let your velociraptor out in the process of clearing all the dumb trees littered about. Oh and those trees are not automatically marked to be demolished when you attempt to make a fence. So you have to exit the menus, which you are 3 deep in sub menus at that point to then enter 3 more sub menus to demolish the trees, then go back to fence placing. And you can't create an exhibit without a door. You have the ability to upgrade your fences to any other fence which is a nice feature, but you can't do that with the door so you have to pause time. Demolish the door. Place a singular fence in its place. And place a new door. I simply ask why. Once you have your exhibit finally build you have to both decorate the inside and outside. The problem with that is for decorations outside to count they have to be pretty close to the area you want to get the bonus, but at the same time exhibits have to be DIRECTLY attached to paths. If not directly attached guests can't view the exhibit so it's either decorations or viewing positions. And on top of all of that, grass can not hold a decoration level only paths. Dinos require a certain size exhibit for proper conditions, but when building an exhibit you won't know the area until AFTER it is built. Meaning either you do the math to find the area of the exhibit you need prior to building it or you place it. Realize it is too small, make an addition HOPING it is now enough, then use the horrendous demolish controls to take out the fence section that needs to go. The teddy bear dino toy just breaks the building system all together. It's hitbox is broken or something as no matter where you click on the screen the teddy bear toy gets selected. So no teddy for my dinos.
The menus, good lord the menus, every menu feels very obtuse. Want to place a decoration and same scenery one after the other? Well you can but after placing your decoration and click the back button it entirely closes the build menu, meaning you have to reopen the menu to select scenery. There's no reason I should have to reopen the build menu. The backpack menu is god awful too. Over the course of playing, whether it is from expeditions to completing challenges you rack up items but each use of an item CLOSES the backpack menu, meaning that if you wanted to place the three eggs you just purchased or you want to use the 20 something money items you have been saving you will have to open the menu for EACH item you consume. I have over 40 consumables sitting in my inventory because I refuse to use such a hostile system. Oh and there is an inventory limit? Because why not, artificial limitations is this games strong suit. At the bottom of the screen there is a view menu to see the decoration level, water availability, etc but whenever you select one of those it also selects whatever item you are hoving over. Meaning you can not scroll around your park to see the values you opened the menu for in the first place. The menus for guests, dinos, and employees are minimalist to say the least. They use pictures for stats with no other way to further understand what those stats mean. Want to know why the guest has a burger next to them. So do I. Yes there is a campaign to learn these things but that is the only place to learn this stuff. So if you forget a single feature, you have to go back to the campaign and replay the level you think teaches you the forgotten mechanic. A simple features book in the office would fix this.
Lastly features, this one will be short but there's a few that I have a gripe with. You only get paid at the end of the day, meaning early game you will quickly spend your funds on expansion, then have to wait the whole day to get paid again, to spend it within the first five minutes, rinse and repeat. Oh and every ingame day that passes flashes your screen and exits any menus you were in. Mid expedition? No you're not. Placing a new exhibit? You wish. Also money is not even a trouble in the first place because the bank is so powerful. With only two scientist I was able to convert science points into about $15k a day. So why artificially limit your daily spending if you can just get a free $5k whenever you want.
