Much like its predecessor, Planet Coaster 2 is a theme park creative management game which lets you design and run your own amusement park and offers new features compared to its predecessor.
The biggest and most obvious change to the sequel is the addition of water parks. You can now add swimming pools, lazy rivers, and a variety of water slides which all integrate seamlessly into your usual theme park staples of flat rides, shops, and, of course, rollercoasters.
Speaking of rollercoasters, the game has added a bunch of new track elements including switching tracks, tilting tracks, and vertical drop tracks, allowing you to design custom rides with unparalleled creativity.
As was the case with Planet Coaster: Console Edition, this sequel has charming graphics and a great accompanying soundtrack. The guest animations are particularly good, as it’s fun to watch them wander around the park and gawp at your creations. There is a lengthy campaign with fully voiced character narrators, although you may find some of these over-the-top personalities grating.
The path building system, which was particularly frustrating in the previous game, has been overhauled and its now much easier to build large open plazas thanks to bunch of new tools. The controls, however, still take some getting used to, especially for perfectionist builders, and it can be confusing navigating through many tabs of options.
While you can customise assets and scenery by mixing and matching elements, this can get fiddly, so you may prefer to use the predesigned blueprints to quickly build up your park. Persevere, though, and it’s possible to share your designs with other players on the Frontier Workshop. There are new scenery themes including mythology and Vikings, but many options from the previous game are disappointingly absent. This is particularly frustrating as staples such as fantasy and sci-fi may wind up locked behind a pay wall in the future.
One improvement over the previous game is you can now attach scenery to flat rides and even coaster trains so that they can fit into any themed area of your park allowing you to reuse the same flat rides in different themed areas. There’s also a new scenery brush to help quickly fill empty areas with trees and rocks.
In conclusion, Planet Coaster 2 is a worthy sequel to the original and it seems Frontier has really listened to fan feedback and delivered what fans have been longing for. If you liked the original then you’ll love this follow-up, but genre newcomers could find the sheer spectrum of options here a touch overwhelming.
