CoasterVille Review – Zynga Social Game on Facebook

CoasterVille is a Facebook social game in which the object is to build and run your own online amusement park with a focus towards creating bigger and better theme park roller coasters. You build up your park adding not just custom-built coasters but loads of other rides and attractions, businesses including food carts and shops, operations like hotels, restrooms, First Aid, and Lost and Found, plus decorations. There are even park mascots and a Parade that you can start that winds its way all through your park. Game play is based around building up your theme park into themed areas/kingdoms that are very reminiscent of those at Disneyland – Fantasy Kingdom, Frontier, Jungle, Future City (including a “Tower of Tomorrow”), and Beach. The social aspect of the game involves having Facebook friends as “neighbors” who you can visit each day, collect items, and receive “inspiration” (used to do things like build, in quests, or upgrading).

The concept of this game is a good one – I like the graphics, the concept of building roller coasters with your own individual style, and the way all the rides and attractions look, it really feels like you can create a fantastic virtual theme park except …?

A few problems that really harm what could otherwise be a super game.

  • 1. The greatest problem with this game is how very difficult it is to expand your park. There is a constant demand with more and more “quests” to keep adding and growing your park but there is just not enough room to put everything. The gameplay keeps asking you as part of a quest to build an attraction, add decorations, build more attractions, add a restroom, add more decorations – which would be great if there was ample room to place everything. There’s not. Every other player I have as a neighbor has a park just stuffed with everything all placed together, just like mine, so that you can barely see the roads or place any decorations so that they can be seen. It is close to impossible to create a theme park that is attractive visually. To expand you need large amounts of “Recommendations” which you get by handing out “Annual Passes”, but you only get a couple a day and for the rest must do the usual Zynga social gamers action of begging your neighbors for the item.
  • 2. The game also, which is typical of all Facebook games by Zynga, is yet another one of their “Beggarville” games, as I like to call them, and requires a great deal of begging via posting on your wall or “asking” friends for help in order to progress in the game. The reward offered for completing stages of quests are often very small for all the stuff you must accomplish to complete the steps in each quest.
  • 3. The amount of “energy” offered each day seems small, especially as your park grows and there are many attractions to collect from and boost.

All in all, I find this a fun game and will continue to play – unfortunately, seems like many are dropping out of this game, most of my neighbors seem to have given up on it.

CoasterVille Game App Page on Facebook