Planet Coaster 2 review

If we’re to take video games at face value, owning and operating a theme park is pretty straightforward. Buildings come ready assembled and pre-folded, ready to pop up instantly, shops never run out of food, trees can be uprooted and replanted in mere seconds, and no one dies in horrific Cup ‘n’ Saucer incidents and sues the clothes off your back. Such is the world of Planet Coaster 2 from Frontier Developments, a super-lighthearted theme park Sim with an onus on fun and frivolity that meets resistance from its tendency to overcomplicate things coming the other way.

In a nutshell, Planet Coaster 2 doesn’t deviate much from established principles, though does attempt to deepen and broaden the experience offered by its predecessor. Often accused of being a little too simplistic, this is Planet Coaster’s revenge as a franchise, as even the tutorial required a restart after I incorrectly placed a rollercoaster and the game wouldn’t let me delete it so I could get the entrance steps facing the right way.

With a campaign based on the mostly friendly competition between two rival park builders, Planet Coaster 2 presents a cast of colourful, likeable mentors to guide you through the initial steps of placing rides, erecting shops, providing power supplies, and hiring staff to maintain the park and serve the public.

The management element can be as deep or as shallow as you like for most of it. While it guides you well enough, this is a management sim at the end of the day, and there are menus hidden in menus all the way down. You not only have to provide services and paths to them, but also ensure rides are safety tested and conform to regulations. You must also power them, building energy stations and water pumps for the pools.

Newly added are flumes, which can be built in any body of water and can be simple or complex. Building these is more intricate a job than coasters, which come ready-made and much easier to install. While you can fiddle with prices in shops and the cost of rides, or even inspect individual guests (who are all named) for their wellbeing, the actual progression is pretty basic.

Build a staff room, build a maintenance workshop, and hire maintenance engineers and they’ll take care of the research for you. I’ve never heard of a theme park leaving innovation and evolution in the hands of the janitorial staff, but that’s what happens here. You don’t even need to work for it either: simply hire maintenance workers and wait, and the research points will slowly build and you can just unlock things from a list with a click.

This goes for rides as well as shops and facilities, or even new decorations. Money is fairly easy to come by as long as you’re meeting your guests’ requirements, and regular challenges add an extra dimension to the objective list. You can make it easier by tweaking the difficulty, too, though you probably won’t need to. The difficulty here comes from slightly fiddly controls and the fact that erasing mistakes isn’t always as simple as just hitting CTRL-Z.

One of the most irritating aspects is, as usual, building paths. I’ve not played many management sims of this nature where path-building is as straightforward as it should be (see also Park Beyond), and Planet Coaster 2 is no exception. You’ll need to provide paths in and out of the rides, but where some rides allow you to select the placement of both gates (as with the teacups, for example), things like coasters come with predetermined entrances and exits which you can’t always see until you’ve placed the damn things. And then all the excess bumf like steps and gateways become separate models on the ground, so you try to move it all and only move the coaster. Often you’ll need to select all and delete all, which makes it easy to accidentally click a tree or innocent dustbin into oblivion at the same time.

It may sound like a small thing, but it’s one of a few ways that Planet Coaster 2 fails to be intuitive or simple enough to match its happy-go-lucky presentation. Sometimes you’ll need to just build a pool to pass an objective; other times you’ll also need a flume to hit a certain rating with guests that it simply won’t hit. Sometimes you’ll either need to tear up rides and start again or create intricate maze-like pathways to connect them to the main drag.

That being said, it’s an incredibly charming and colourful park builder, with a huge variety of decorations, statues, flat rides, roundabouts, shops, and coasters to choose from. Being able to jump into the passenger seat of a moving rollercoaster might not be innovative anymore, but it certainly feels great, and being able to get down to ground level and see your creation as your guests do is just lovely.

Building in the sandbox mode feels more enjoyable to me, though, with less restrictions and fewer demands on your time. It feels less like busywork and more like you’re building a place for people to come and have fun. Ultimately, though, Planet Coaster 2 is a genuinely lovely and likeable management sim, and one that gives back precisely what you put in. It might have a few snags in the mechanism, but it’s a pleasant way to kill a few hours and flex your creative muscles.