mk47at: So… now that there are offline installers… anyone care to say if there is a campaign?
There is no campaign it looks like. It starts you in a fairly brief (and not that great) tutorial covering some of the basic aspects. I didn't see a way to skip the tutorial, but once you finish it (or maybe just once you save the game?) there is a new game option. That lets you choose "career" (standard settings) or "sandbox" (custom settings). After that there are three terrain types to choose from and then you start with an empty park (like you do in the tutorial). Possibly something else is unlocked later, but I doubt it.
Also, it crashed already before I finished the tutorial, never a good sign, although luckily there is an autosave that defaults to every 5 minutes. I saw a few other bugs too, such as not being able to rotate decorations after they are placed and the tutorial not recognizing that buildings it wants have been placed previously. It should really have stayed early access for at least a bit longer, hopefully it isn't going to be abandoned in this state.
It crashed a second time within maybe a couple of hours at most (and I don't think it was that long) so I'd strongly recommend waiting a bit before trying it.
I wouldn't call it bad (as long as the crashes are fixed soon) so far but I can see why the price is quite a bit lower than Parkitect. Some things are just different (some people will prefer one way or the other). Possibly some things will be clearly better in this one but I haven't played long enough to see if I would say that about anything. I personally like the general graphics style of this one better, although I don't like the indoor aspect. Research gives you research points that let you unlock particular stuff in a research tree (where you can see the full tree in advance) but in addition to research points things are locked by "demand level" which is another progression metric in the game based mostly on how much stuff you place (buildings and decorations). Buildings are less configurable by default but have mobile game style unlocks after a while (likely based on number of visitors to that building) where you can choose one of three options to upgrade. Benches and trash cans are auto-placed on paths and cleaning is done based on radius around cleaning buildings (not path distance :( ) rather than roaming janitors (same with repairs). Park ticket prices affect visitor expectations and rides and other buildings also have price settings (that can be unlocked fairly quickly). I haven't tried building a coaster yet (there are some pre-designed ones available) but the decoration building is less capable in many ways (you can't build full buildings) and more annoying than Parkitect (for example, you can put a tree on another tree but that happens far too easily when you are just trying to place a tree on the ground). Like Parkitect visitors don't like to see some buildings (the tutorial doesn't mention this unless I missed it but you can see it on the attractiveness overlay), although at least on restrooms upgrades can reduce this effect significantly (I don't know if it is possible to eliminate it with later upgrades).