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What is it
Planet Coaster 2, the highly anticipated sequel to Frontier Developments' acclaimed theme park simulation game, is set to launch on November 6, 2024, for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.
Here is my review for the PC version.
Whether you are a perfectionist who wants to make sure you squeeze every penny from the imperfect park denizens who toil sleepily along your paths in Planet Coaster 2, or you're more of the family type, building a park like an embrace made up of 8 tentacled arms with seats on them, like the octopus ride and you just want to make everyone feel all warm and fuzzy right from the get-go, Planet Coaster 2 offers you a couple of ways to do it.
First, the game sets you up nicely with options; leaping in, you see three main branches: Career, Franchise, and Sandbox. Career has you stepping into the shoes of a newcomer, taking on a series of escalating endeavors to fix amusement parks around the world, learning the ins and outs, and unlocking research for new rides as you progress. Or buying extra parcels of land to build out your parks—even across two giant sections of land through a gap, because nothing screams safe like a Looney Tunes canyon separating your ride sections. But that's where I find the game charming; from the side stories, there are minor changes and scenarios like fixing old, beat-up parks and getting them running. It’s not all new stuff, but it works well to keep you invested.
Second you have Franchise mode is up next, a new part of the game that lets you build up with pals, creating franchised parks around the world—a lockstep solution to a rough world, where the only cure is unadulterated fun and a barf bag you can tie around your neck because you just can't stop riding.
Next up is Sandbox mode. Sandbox is exactly what you'd expect, though you can adjust all kinds of settings to make it as hard or as easy as you want. You start by choosing one of the four landscape types: tropical, temperate, arid, and a more arboreal one. Want to go free-for-all, ignoring requirements? Go for it! Or set yourself up in a challenging mode with everything turned on. You can even bring in your career game park from your save and play it here.
What you do
Regardless of what you do, Planet Coaster is exactly what it sounds like—a deep simulation of running a coaster park, trying to decide between the pull of exciting rides versus the cleanup requirements that the nausea they induce costs, balancing the expense of a huge swimming pool and its attendant lifeguards, or just letting nature take its course and letting your park-goers turn into dead, human-shaped swimming lessons to teach the others.
While the game is called Planet Coaster, be aware that much of its simulation revolves around the movement of characters in the world. Setting up paths and creating a pleasant space for your coasters is important because if no one can get to your sweet ride, aptly named "Stomach Launcher," then it won't matter. Paths consist of three main types: normal park paths, those restricted for park workers that visitors won’t use, and, of course, queue lines for every ride—something you’ll want to pay attention to. Controlling snap-to, elevation, and the way each kind of path works is vital here.
Pathing, people and Puking
But for newcomers, expect to watch customers blatantly refuse to use a path, only to find out there’s some hidden obstacle or subtle height change that’s hard to locate. Trying to get these little bastards to follow the path is about as fun as…
Once you have a general path to a plot of land you want to build on, you leap into the section for choosing what construction you want, from flat rides to roller coasters, parks, and merchandise. When placing a ride, you can choose from default versions handpicked by the developers—excellent examples of what can be done in a jiffy. You can place these down, which then requires you to set up the entrance and exit, ensuring they’re clear and logical. Or you can go deep, creating your own custom rides, starting with just the bare essentials and building the rest from scratch—from the entire track setup to the surrounding items—making sure to add scenery, as a bare-bones roller coaster results in less interested visitors. It won’t have the pomp and circumstance a ride called "The Child Emulator" may require.
This means you can lay down a blueprinted track but still go in and customize the theme and look to your specifications. It’s just like car tuning, where many start with the same car, but you end up with a dreamy, smooth-handling two-door, while your friend ends up with a nitrous-boosted death machine.
You can adjust the angle, turn, twist, and drops—everything—setting pieces for the first big drop and then going as deep as you want, as long as you have the money and space. There’s even a handy auto-complete button for when you get close to the end of the ride but don’t want to deal with the idiosyncrasies of a 90-degree turn into an invert combined with a 90-degree twist. It’s a handy feature, and while it doesn’t always work, it’s well worth trying, as you can always use the completed section to get an idea, then make your own adjustments.
Rides or Die!
Then you need to make sure the ride has what it needs, including power, by setting up generators around the park, as well as distributors to transfer the energy where it’s needed. There’s a handy indicator showing what’s required. Pool setups, which I’ll talk about in a second, require the same thing but with water and filtration—so that little leaky-bladder Jimmy doesn’t foul up your pool each time he takes a wizz in it. The game has a nice set of decorations you can place directly over the more industrial parts of your park, so even if they’re near your ride, you can put some shrubbery around, cover it with a container, and make it all look nice and tidy.
Each coaster has to be set and tested first, and trust me, this is worth it. One of the beginning areas has you take over a coaster park that looks like something straight out of a goddamn Scooby-Doo ending—all decrepit and destroyed. So the first thing I did was get to work and, unfortunately, didn’t pay attention to the very end of a ride before I hit test, effortlessly flinging empty cars into the trees 100 feet beyond the end of the track.
The next haphazard moment came when I built what I consider to be the world’s greatest water slide ever, consisting of a single drop and a single turn. However, somehow I hadn’t noticed that the turn aimed at the edges of the slide’s own supports. Watching a test dummy shoot out of it and slam crotch-first into the supports at 30 miles an hour, like he had a family vendetta against water slides, was hilarious but also a useful lesson.
For the first time, the event sequencer tool lets you choreograph exciting in-park moments, like shooting fire up when a car hits a certain part of a ride.
Nest isn't Best
Tracked, flat, and normal coasters each have their own types, as well as a variety of different shops and stores. The only real issue is that combining so many groups under a couple of sorting tabs—including an "Extras" style tab—can be a bit messy. It makes sense ultimately, but it can be hard to parse through everything, even with search filters, especially because while there are three themes, they don’t look dramatically different. That’s, of course, where customization comes in; you can make your own, paint them, and add anything to them. So while the core outhouse may disturbingly resemble a soft drink stand, you can outfit them to look dramatically different if you want to take the time.
When it comes to total tile sets and overall themes, it’s hard to compare this to the first game. It has a large number of options, but there are some elements that I can see longtime fans of the original might want or expect on day one here. That being said, it’s a great basis for building, and because you're dealing with humans, you never quite know how it’s going to go. Each time you find a small efficiency or figure out how to get little Jimmy from the end of the swings to the start of the next ride feels like a real achievement.
Swimming pools and Fools!
Speaking of pools, they’re easily constructed using the new pool-building tool, which allows you to place geometric or custom shapes to create the ideal swimming area that takes into account both space and safety. You can add wave machines, a couple of diving boards, and call it good. Or, you can use the new flume system, creating huge water slides like their own watery roller coasters, ejecting kids into the air and hopefully back down into the pool.
Be aware, though—pools are their own unique attraction here and require a bit of understanding, as it’s not just about loading and unloading little bipedal wallets like the rides. You need changing rooms and may want to place a specific kiosk nearby so that people can buy tickets as well as pool supplies like sunscreen and shade awnings.
What’s nice is that most items you place auto-hire staff. For rides, they require at least one attendant, though you’ll want more to handle breaks and scheduling, as well as maintenance staff, janitors, and mascots. There’s a whole range of staff you can hire, set their pay, schedule them as strictly as you want, and assign them to specific rides. For pools, the staff are lifeguards, tasked with pulling out any visitors who get in over their heads.
Setting up how each worker approaches their job is vital. Learning which aspects matter more than others is an experience in itself—and one that isn’t always perfectly balanced because these are little simulated humans. Sometimes, the choice comes down to having a janitor cleaning toilets versus cleaning up outside a local ride after kids lose their insides because their parents thought the TWISTER was a living room game from the 1970s and not a roller coaster built by some deviant who took left-turn lessons from NASCAR wrecks.
That’s just one ride right there. The rest of the game has you constantly trying to place all that right next to another ride that also needs its own water, power, attendants, and paths. That’s when Planet Coaster starts to blossom. Getting one ride up and running can be fast with blueprints, or you can spend hours outfitting it. Regardless of its complexity, it’s the multilayered systems at play that make it so engaging.
Destroying the Land!
The game has a nice system for adjusting the terrain as well, sorting out flat areas, and making sure your ride—which can bore through the ground if you want—is set up just right. It all takes time. Then you sit back and watch how it performs.
And that’s where the tracking systems come into play. On the normal game screen, you can see your money, the time of day, a weather forecast (yes, weather affects tourists' desire to use some rides), and objectives and problems in the top left for easy access.
You can also use a series of heat-maps for mood, hunger, thirst, power, water, and more, which is great for getting an overview of the general park. You can track every single visitor and their wants and needs to decide if putting a Bob’s Burger Shack near the exit makes sense, or if visitors need more sitting areas or cover.
Then you can go into the actual park manager screen, which shows your intake of visitors, total revenue, park prestige (a combination of factors including ride uniqueness), and an advertisement system. Be aware, this isn’t super robust—it’s not tracking CTR or anything. It’s just a series of steps to make sure coaster fans know your park has some sweet rides, as well as how big the audience is and their awareness of your park.
At some point, you’ll want to expand the area too. Each map has sectioned-off areas you can buy and then alter, adjusting the landscape and building into expanded spaces if you have the money and desire.
Controls and Keyboards
With so many controls, nested menus in menus, and editors in editors, the controller worked so well for what I wanted to do. Sure, there’s a bit of clumsiness here and there, but as this is a console title as well, it’s outstanding that they’ve kept this working so well. It’s almost astonishingly well done, and of course, with a mouse and keyboard, it’s even easier. With the controller, it’s not Flight Sim 2020 complicated, but there is a learning curve, with some buttons serving one function when pressed and another when held. It doesn’t always make sense, but the setup is a delicate balance of the most-used options being just one or two buttons away.
It’s not all sunshine and rainbows.
Some parts of Planet Coaster infuriate me. First, the handling of staff and scheduling. It can be difficult to figure out staffing needs due to breaks and the way the park runs, with different workers wanting longer days or more work. Trying to figure out how to staff each job correctly, as well as the impact of removing a break or hiring someone else, can be challenging. The help section works somewhat for these things, but because it’s a sim and so many things are interconnected, it’s sometimes hard to tell if the issue is a lack of people or if a single facilities building isn’t in the right place.
Also, for heat-maps, I would have loved a facilities filter because a ton of buildings look alike. If someone takes a break and you weren’t prepared, hiring a ride attendant and getting them to work on the ride takes longer than it should. I noticed that hiring them doesn’t immediately switch them to wanting to run the ride; sometimes they’d just walk to the other side of the park, even when I dropped them next to the ride (you can’t seem to drop them directly on it).
Themes are a bit lean when it comes to the themes, with Viking, modern, and classic style sets, each with their own designs. There are also additional cosmetics as presale options. Huge fans of the original may find some missing elements or expect parts to come later. That said, being able to take almost anything in the game’s scenery section and attach it to rides means you can make your own variations, but without a ton of work, they won’t look dramatically different.
The career mode had an oddity where if I continued past the tutorial section even for a moment, I could never advance to the next scenario without leaving the current game mode, going into another, and loading that section. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get it to move forward. So when it said, “Go to the next scenario” or “Stick around,” I instantly had to pick “Go to the next.”
Lastly, while you can erect constructions that look like restaurants and hotels, you can’t actually make them functional—but I assume that’s DLC or something.
Old is new Again
While the game at its core may not look like it’s doing much, once you zoom in, there’s astonishing detail: kids flailing their last moments in the swimming pools, others vomiting on the roller coaster tracks, and mascots bouncing on rubber balls. The Sims-like look of the characters helps it perform well, but I was surprised by how much I liked the game’s visual style. Graphically, it performs very well.
Rust and Running Smooth
Performance-wise, it runs smoothly with AMD and DLSS, with frame generation and its up-scaler offering nice frame rate improvements. There are also settings you can adjust based on your system. On a 4090 at 4K maxed out, it had moments over 90 FPS, while a 2080 hit 75 to 80 FPS at 2K, with frame generation pushing it over 150 FPS. The game’s FSR implementation isn’t the best, as it sometimes causes shimmering on gradients and steps. The game takes some generous liberties with crowd rendering, but one of the best parts is that almost every character’s animation indicates their condition. If you see two dudes doing the “Pepe dance,” you won’t confuse it with three sunburned characters because you forgot to put up shade on a 105-degree day.
One big problem frequently is that if you’re scanning the park with any coaster or items menus open, the game begins to stutter and fit, even on NVME storage and with 64 GB of RAM on a 4090. It can become a bit of a slideshow.
The Sounds of Terror
I like the audio; you can hear kids screaming on rides, the burble and chortle of excited park-goers, and if you want, you can switch to first-person mode to walk around and hear more details.
The music is generic in style or at the very least unsurprising in its sugary sound, but I like that for specific rides and scenery, you can pick music to blare out—excited techno every time a teacup ride finishes. It’s all up to you.
While the only voice acting is in career mode, and it’s not bad; it’s just a series of talking heads giving instructions, thanking you, or chastising you for screwing things up. It’s campy stuff, and after the first time, it’s not something you’ll listen to again, but I appreciate the voice work.
Funfactor and Feeling
Games like this run the risk of doing too much simulation or not enough. If the game wants to walk the dangerous line between both, it has to offer just the right range of options, so that someone doesn’t feel like, “If all these traits are tracked, why can’t I see why one person randomly leaves the pack and heads elsewhere?” It’s all about balancing the macro, micro, and even “nano” level of detail, so to speak.
Despite some issues—not least of which is the desire to punt some of these little buggers off the planet when they won’t follow instructions—Planet Coaster 2 does a great job.. The UI can be confusing, especially with the placement of each segment, which sometimes feels like looking up the word “math” in a dictionary and finding a formula for estimating liquid pressure across uneven terrain. But man, it’s fun.
Even when things go sideways—like when two coasters are broken down and you’re desperately trying to get a maintenance guy there while Billybob is on lunch across the park—the game still works with a laid-back attitude. You’re doing your best, not always the best. Just like any well-oiled machine, some days things don’t work.
But on the days it does, it’s glorious.
Rating!
Buy
This game is a blast. It runs well enough, has a huge range of options, and while I’d have liked a cleaner arrangement for items, the new ways to combine them with the added features make it exactly the kind of game I want.
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