In our previous piece looking at the Spooky Pack DLC for Planet Coaster: Console Edition, we donned our best bedsheets and tried to give our guests the willies. With only a couple of exclusive rides though, our guests were less than impressed. Here’s hoping then that the Adventure Pack DLC for Planet Coaster can offer a bit more variation.
In homage to our now deserted Spooky Town theme park, we chose the name Adventure Town and placed this new park in the middle of the desert. We wanted our guests to have an adventure all on their own over the dunes, just to even get to the theme park.
Straight off the bat though we have a roller coaster! Gold Fever is a runaway train-type affair with rickety tracks around and through a Mayan temple. Just watch out for the circular saws inside the temple that really help to up that ‘Fear’ rating of the ride. A perfect way to open up my new theme park.
There are also two water-based rides; one that acts like a riverboat ride and doesn’t require a body of water to be built on, and a transport ride. Land Ahoy, the riverboat ride, takes you on a guided tour through some Mayan/Aztec ruins. It’s fairly relaxing after the excitement of the roller coaster.
Then there is Island Adventure, which doesn’t have a stock ride available so it can take a while to find it within the menu. It is a water transport ride on a steam-powered boat that goes on rails through a body of water. You can put several stops on your route – providing you have enough theme park to visit that is.
The stock rides for both the riverboat and roller coaster do take up a fair amount of room though, so having some transport in between might not be a bad investment.
As I learnt from Spooky Town though, rides can only get you so far – you need amenities too. The Adventure Pack does not have anywhere near as many facilities as the Spooky Pack, but it still covers the basics with drinks stalls, food vendors, gift stores, a hotel and a ginormous park entrance. This time around the theme is tiki with flame sconces illuminating the lodges up brilliantly.
There is also a lack of scenery in comparison. There is a general theme with the Adventure Pack DLC in that bigger is better, because most of the items are on a much grander scale than the Spooky Pack, but there are less items to choose from. Much of the scenery is better built into the water as well, with the animatronic crocodiles and hippos examples of this. So if using the Adventure Pack, it is best to do so with the addition of a lake.
Thankfully there is another new entertainer also available, because King Ghoster and the robotic Dex-R look very out of place in Adventure Town. Reneé Feu is her name, and she carries around a confetti gun with her. Whether that is to excite with an explosion of confetti or terrify by holding unsuspecting folk at gunpoint isn’t clear, but the kids love her!
Once again though, the Adventure Pack DLC brings a huge number of customisation items to make your park unique. In the Spooky Pack, I put spiders on everything I could; this time around I went for another arachnid and placed scorpions everywhere. Small ones next to paths, giant ones round blind corners. By the end of it the place would have been better renamed as Scorpion Town.
There are numerous pieces available which let you design your own ancient statue with either gold, stone or a combination of both pieces. I made several, just so the scorpions had even more scenery to skitter over.
This park took me a while longer to build as opposed to the Spooky Pack one, mainly due to me taking ages to figure out where the Island Adventure was hiding away in the menus. Once I found it though, Planet Coaster once again reminded me how intuitive it is to use on consoles; it was a breeze to create. My park rating and guest numbers took a bit of a dive whilst I scoured the build menus but managed to peak at a rating of just under 500, with guests around the 700 mark. These are surprisingly somewhat under my Spooky Pack numbers.
Once again though, I find myself thinking the Planet Coaster: Adventure Pack DLC on Xbox doesn’t have enough to warrant a full theme park. The rides might be far more exciting than what is on offer in the Spooky Pack, but conversely that has more decorations to beautify your park with. But now that I have a working transport ride in the centre, my grand plans to have different sections and themes can be brought to life in a big way. I may even build Arachnid Island somewhere in the middle of my lake, where the ongoing turf war between spiders and scorpions can begin.
Massive thanks to Frontier for providing us access to the Planet Coaster Adventure Pack on Xbox.
