Planet Coaster 2 Review (PS5, Xbox Series X/S, & PC)

When you don’t have the means or time to head over to Disney World, you can always slouch into your sofa and boot up Planet Coaster 2. Yup, the sequel is out now, after eight years of playing the original. Frontier has simply perfected its craft by now, with the predecessor and Planet Zoo, Jurassic World Evolution, and now a sequel. 

Granted, the studio may fail to fulfill every fan’s expectations. You’ll doubtlessly find some features lacking or lose psyche from the seemingly smaller-sized campaign. You might expect the sequel to be bigger and better, but I promise, there are some gold mines to discover in the mechanics and gameplay of the new game.

Without much ado, let’s dive into all the features and tools the new game offers in our Planet Coaster 2 review below.

Endless Thrills

There are really limitless ways to play Planet Coaster 2. Literally, the gameplay caters to gamers of all kinds. Whether you’re a newbie to the world of park management and simulation. Or you’re an expert looking to come up with the most inventive designs. The game has it all. Better still? It gives you all the tools you might need to dive into its endless thrills. 

On the one hand, you can kick off your journey in career mode. It’s structured in four chapters, each posing increasingly challenging objectives that earn you stars. You don’t have to play the challenges in order. Thus, giving you the freedom to tackle the objectives you desire at your own pace. The beauty of career mode is that it holds your hand, which is especially welcome when you are a rookie in park building and management. 

You’ll be given pre-made coasters needing repairs or the challenge of taking their design to the next level. This can be a downer for gamers looking to design their own coasters from scratch. But it’s also a great avenue to learn the ropes of Planet Coaster 2’s gameplay. The tutorial does come in handy, especially given that there is quite a lot you need to learn to utilize the game’s systems to the fullest.

The more you play, though, exploring the rest of the game modes and diving deeper into the sandbox, you’ll soon realize that the tutorial misses a few essential pointers. So, you’ll still need to figure some things out for yourself. Part of the reason for some unexplained mechanics is that there are hundreds of ways to customize coasters, terrain, water slides, scenery, and more.

Joy Unleashed

The sandbox mode is where you can truly unleash the joy of building. Given the hundreds of customization options, whether for the coasters themselves or the scenery around them, you’ll be faced with limitless ways to be creative. At times, it can feel overwhelming, which is where the one-stop workshop comes in handy. 

The workshop is already streaming with lots of user-created rides, parks, buildings, scenery, and more. Some of the creations are super out-of-the-box. Thus, giving you just the perfect amount of inspiration to come up with your own unique parks. It can be borrowing a single piece of design you like or using the whole theme park as a blueprint.

There are no restrictions whatsoever in sandbox mode. You can build almost anything you imagine with all the tools you need right at your fingertips. Using a drag-and-drop style, you’ll easily find the design elements you’re looking for and drop them into the areas you want them to go. Then, you can edit the layout however you like, placing curves and bends in a pretty fluid way.

In this way, Planet Coaster 2 allows you to create the most unique coasters you can think of. This is where you flex your creative muscles, scrolling through the UI to design the exact spirals, curves, and bends you’re looking for. The fun doesn’t stop there, as you have to ensure that the guests who use your newly designed coaster experience a safe flight. 

Steep drops and sharp turns can be fun to incorporate into your coasters. However, they have to adhere to customer safety. Ideally, coasters should never go above a fear level of five. Otherwise, you may risk scaring off your customers and losing money as a result.

Face Your Fears

Besides the management of your theme park, from putting up shops and erecting thrilling coaster rides, you also have to oversee the simulation side of Planet Coaster 2. It isn’t the most complex system, and it generally requires keeping your guests and staff happy. 

Every guest walking into your park has a record-keeping track of their experience, from the money they spend to the rides they take. Ultimately, you want to ensure they remain well-fed, watered, and safe. This introduces the need to set up shops that have a deeper level of creativity in the design and placement of the stands. 

The same goes for the overall happiness of your customers, whether it’s ensuring they can evade sunburn. With Planet Coaster 2’s new dynamic weather systems, you want to ensure guests can find ways to enjoy your theme parks without suffering heat strokes.

As for the staff, well, their simulation is much easier. All you need to do is hire staff for the different services you offer. So janitors, mechanics, vendors, lifeguards and more. Once you hire staff, little management is required. As long as you keep your customers happy, they will earn you handsome pay that caters sufficiently to your staff.

Face First

The only gripe with staff management is they seem to just be walking around until there is an emergency. Mechanics are hardly proactive in constantly checking the rides for maintenance. Only when there is an actual breakdown do you get a notification that requires manually assigning mechanics to the repair job? It could be a bug, as Planet Coaster did have the option to schedule maintenance every ten minutes or so.

Constructing paths is, as veterans can imagine, still a nightmare. I mean, connecting a path from point A to B is easy peasy. However, pathing the coasters is often tricky, even in Planet Coaster. The sequel has tried to make it more intuitive by introducing auto-pathing, in addition to incremental and stamping. See, coasters’ entry and exits aren’t always easy to connect. So, you can spend a great deal of time constructing several paths and attempting to connect them all from the entry to the exit route. More often than not, you will make a mistake that won’t always be easily erased by a mere CTRL-Z undo option. 

In truth, truly mastering Planet Coaster 2’s mechanics can be an exercise in frustration. Especially when you’re an over-achiever in creating the most unique theme parks. It’s not even that the gameplay itself is flawed, but rather, the controls can be fiddly. The UI, too, can sometimes be cluttered. It can have many tools that may be easy for controllers to navigate, but it’s a nightmare to mouse-and-click through unnecessary options.

Make Waves

Another gripe is the mundane newly added research feature. It lets you open up a new Workshop. Afterward, a mechanic is automatically assigned to it. Then, you keep on playing the game to allow research points to accumulate. Once you’ve reached a certain threshold, you can cash in points earned and unlock new rides and attractions. It’s simply too simple to carry out and hardly involves any strategy or thought process. Not to mention that mechanics are hardly researchers of new rides. Nor do they demand much from you –just the usual meager pay. 

On the bright side, the newly added water slides are really thriving. They pretty much follow the same in-depth customization, offering dozens, if not hundreds, of ways to shape and design the water parks. You can design curvy pools or make them ripe for deep-end diving. The water slides can go as high as you want and as crazy as you make them –only they must always keep your guests safe. They can also be steep and bendy tubes or transparent. They can have body bowl designs or raft-like. The sky’s the limit when it comes to the designs you can come up with. And that’s pretty much the core of the game that will keep you playing for hours on end despite the aforementioned shortcomings.

Verdict

Planet Coaster 2 has far outdone itself, that is if you play the game with the understanding that it can have its limits. For instance, while the game markets itself as a management and simulation experience, some of its mechanics can feel rather simple and mundane. The gameplay remains a mostly park-decorating playthrough, with most of your time spent coming up with the most unique coaster and water slide attractions.

Otherwise, the staff, utilities, and price management system feel lacking. So does the simulation, which only goes as far as keeping track of your guests’ happiness. Moreover, there are a few issues to hoop through: fiddly controls and unexplained mechanics, to name a few. However, the overall gameplay proves to be such a blast, especially for creative gamers. You simply have hundreds of ways to experiment and come up with the theme park and water park design of your dreams.