First off, it plays almost exactly like the first two RCT games, but with 3D graphics. The one notable thing I've found that they changed was that now restaurants and stores don't restock themselves automatically, so your workers have to carry supplies from the delivery center on the edge of the park to the destination. But guests don't like having to see your workers (talk about first world problems!) so you have to construct hidden employee only pathways that are hidden from view to keep their happiness rating from going down. Once your park gets too big for them to feasibly run every single crate of supplies from one end to the other, you can set up underground tunnels that transport the goods to various employee depots throughout the park to shorten the trip.
True to RCT tradition, you'll hire plenty of employees to haul supplies, clean the park, and maintain rides, and then spend the rest of the game saying "Where the [expletive] are they?!"
The 3D graphics are way more appealing than the ugly attempt they made back in RCT3. It actually looks like a 3D version of the first and second RCT! But with the added layer of depth of course comes depth perception issues. I don't remember ever having this much trouble lining up pathways in RCT. It gets even worse when you're building rides and you have to factor in height and track angles as well.
And speaking on paths, they're easily the worst thing about this game. In RCT, all you had to do was click on a tile to put a "path" piece on it. If the tiles next to it had path pieces on them, they would join together. But here, you have to draw the pathways with your mouse. That doesn't sound so bad, except you can only "draw" in straight lines, so you'll have to release the mouse and draw another line each time you need to make a turn. And the most annoying part is that for some reason the game has a hell of a time figuring out when I want my pathways to connect. Granted, if I have two paths running side by side, I don't want them to connect to each other on literally every time. But what's unacceptable is I lost track of how many times I build a ride, made a pathway straight up to the entrance, opened it, and got told that there was no way to get to the ride because the oath is drawn just comes up short in a dead end right outside the entrance! And when that happens, I can't just click or drag the path to connect it to where I want it to go, I have to completely emdelete the entire path and theb redraw it going up to the entrance again and hope it connects! Considering RCT did this perfectly way back on 1999, what possible excuse could the developers have for this in 2026?
Still, I have to admit that the game does have that same addictive quality that RCT did. I played through the first scenario, and rather than go to the next level I decided to just hang around and keep working on the same park for a couple more hours.
The game runs really well on the Steam Deck, too. It has its issues, but none of them are related to the hardware it's running on.