Parkasaurus
A charming game that does a lot right, with only the tiniest flaws showing through from it's tiny development team. Parkasaurus is a bright, colourful, fun and relaxing park management game, with dinosaurs. It doesn't take itself too seriously, like where the dinosaurs come from (...space?), and you can give the dinos hats to wear. It shares a lot of mechanics with Zoo Tycoon - donation boxes, exhibit design, paths, vets and boxing animals. It has lots of campaign maps with varied goals and conditions. It has a really unique and clever exhibit designer where the kind of landscape is categorised based on terrain height and amount of water, and you can design exhibits completely from scratch.
Notes
While my opinion is generally really positive, I need to point out what I think is probably the biggest flaw in the game - you only earn money once per day, not in a constant stream whenever guests spend money. This means:
- You can't react to problems as they arise
- If you spend all your money on building a new dino exhibit at the beginning of the day, you can't afford food, and you can't repair the fences for the rest of the day. If you run out of money while you're building the exhibit, you have to wait until the next day instead of adding small bits to it every few minutes.
- Boredom. If you run out of money, there's nothing you can do about it until the park opens the next day, so might as well just sit there with the game on fast forward
Pros
- Good music
- Nice polygon art style
- You go on digging mini games to get fossils to make more dinos. Great idea in theory, although if you want to reach the deeper levels, you have to put points into staff digging ability, which makes them worse at their real jobs
- Huge research trees, which you gain through a combination of science research, and happy dinosaurs
- Can design exhibits completely from scratch with landscaping tools. The landscapes you create affect the biome of the exhibit, which affects which dinosaurs can be in there
- Lots of campaign maps
- Staff gain experience over time, and you can spend skill points on specific attributes, or leavel them on auto-level up
- First person mode, although the movement and framerate are awful
- You can gives 'themes' to your exhibits, which make them extra nice for dinosaurs, and come with extra objectives to meet
- Weather effects
Cons
- It's difficult to find your staff in the park. There's an overview screen, but clicking on them doesn't take the camera to them [fixed]
- The game doesn't give you the tools to find out how much food you need. I have no idea how much my dinos eat per day apart from regular "can't fill food buckets" warnings. Multiple people have complained about this, but the game still won't tell you how much you need. To compound this, the wiki says both things: "dinos eat the same amount per day" AND "dinos eat 2-4 pieces per day"
- There's no free rotation of the camera, just the 4 isometric angles (there is a free camera rotation, but it cancels it and goes back to isometric any time you click on something)
- If you want to move an item a little bit, you have to move it completely away, pick it up again, then move it back, you can't just adjust the position
- Visitors show sad faces above them, but don't show any issues
- There are keyboard shortcuts to move and delete things, but there's no controls option in the menu. I only know they exist because of looking it up on the Steam community site