Planet Coaster 2
Frontier Developments
Build and customise thrilling roller coasters and incredible water slides, manage the ultimate theme park experience, and share your epic creations. Reach new heights of creativity, management, and sharing as you construct the theme parks of your dreams combining epic water rides and coasters to delight and thrill your park guests. Are you ready to ride the wave?
Frontier Developments is back with Planet Coaster 2 to let players reach new heights of creativity by creating the world’s best theme park. The game expands on the first Planet Coaster and enhances everything it offers. Like with the original, Planet Coaster 2 has multiple game modes. The Career Mode features a range of unique theme parks and water parks across increasingly challenging scenarios. Sandbox Mode is my personal favourite and Franchise Mode gives a leaderboard to competing against other players.
The game features have been rebuilt using feedback from the first game and keep all of the expected elements. It adds some new utilities for scenery, including object scaling, mirroring, and the ability to add scenery pieces directly to the ride, providing even more creative freedom when designing the park. This level of fine control is also applied to the coaster coaster so that players can build a truly unique theme park.
I absolutely loved that they have included water parks to the series, with the possibility of creating a dedicated water park complete with pools, slides and water coasters. The pool editor is a little fiddly and can often glitch out when saving you game, but its not the worse launch bug I’ve ever seen on a game and Frontier have already address this. But the key is that’s it’s possible to create almost any shape you want for your pools and water rides!
Pros
Powerful creative tools
Improved building features
Water attractions are a great addition
Campaign is solid
Sandbox is very flexible
Steam Workshop support
Cons
Lots of micromanagement
Easy to learn but hard to master
Minor bugs with saving and graphics
Park visitors 6,000 cap
While Planet Coaster 2 is very much a simulation game, there are management elements here, but this side of the game takes a backseat. Similar to the first game, general park management only offers a little challenge outside of micromanagement. I actually really enjoy the micromanagement aspect but I can totally see why most people hate it.
I adored Planet Coaster 1 and if you love simulation games, you’ll love this too. This is an absolutely incredible sequel to an already fantastic game series and looks beautiful the new quality of life features make creating theme parks a breeze. The new themes look amazing, coasters are smoother than ever and EVERYTHING in your parks is customisable. Its important to note that there are some day-one performance issues with saving and graphics. Theres also a question about the multiplayer mode, where I thought I’d be allowed to build a park with a friend however this isn’t true and Frontier have quietly removed “multiplayer” tag from the store so I’m not sure if thats arriving in an update or not. For me this doesn’t matter – I’d personally like the ability to kill my visitors on the rides. I’ve asked the developers directly but they said no haha. Other than the small day 1 launch bugs, this shouldn’t stop you from experiencing this truly joyful party of a game!
I’ll be streaming Planet Coaster 2 on Twitch where you can grab some visitor cosmetics for free. Also we’ve teamed up with the developers to give you a chance of winning your own PC Planet Coaster 2 game. Simply head over to our Twitter and enter!
Overall Rating
