Planet Coaster 2
Review
A little closer to Circus Circus than Disneyland
by Jordan Helsley
reviewed on PC
Define Your Fun
Planet Coaster 2 sits somewhere in the middle of those two realities. While you can absolutely build massive abominable coasters and labyrinthian pathways, you could get hung up on your ride not passing a safety check or your guests simply not enjoying your park. There are a few options for turning down the realism requirements, but if your goal is chaos, you'll probably be underserved. For a few brief moments, I appreciated that the game required me to build power stations and run electricity to particular rides. There's a satisfaction in littering your space with these ugly metal boxes, and designing around them with the idea that the guests will never see them. Conversely, when I wanted a true free-form building experience, the Sandbox mode let me turn off this requirement and go nuts. On some level, you can refine the experience to be what you want, but those options very much have a limit and it appears not too far from abandoning the power grid management.
Of course, when you're going through the Career mode, or even the multiplayer Franchise mode, you're going to be playing the game closer to the way the developers intended. Your mileage may vary, but I could find the fun even with some of these more particular "realistic" elements in place. While I see the appeal of a full chaos mode run where your finely crafted rollercoasters might just kill a guest or two, the challenge of spending the better part of an hour designing a track and being prevented from opening it because of a failed test run definitely meets the strategy genre requirement. Besides, you can still virtually ride your death trap, even if no one else can.
Learn From The Best
For better or worse, getting the lay of the land with Planet Coaster 2 relies on how much you invest into the career mode. Not only does it act as an extended tutorial for the game's complex systems and layers of UI, but it also gives you research points that are critical to unlocking new rides and trinkets for your park. Take the new water park features, for example. The ability to build things like water slides and pools is a welcome addition, but there's a (relatively small) chain of research to complete before you can begin in earnest. I understand the desire for the game to give you these goalposts to strive towards, and I found the profoundly silly story mode engaging enough, but I think this progression might have been better served by offering cosmetic themes over tangible rides. The Sandbox mode allows you to enter with all research, thankfully.
As much as the Career mode acts as an extended tutorial, I spent a lot of that time creating those tutorials for myself. Even when the game shows you the exact order of operations to get a ride up and running, it does so in a way that obfuscates the series of UI elements needed to get to the location of the options it teleports you to. When the reins come off, expect to spend a significant amount of energy exploring the menus and overcoming challenges through trial-and-error. I don't get caught up in "console vs PC" debates, but it seems clear to me that the design choices here directly result from the game hitting consoles when it releases. There's a reason, after all, that complex management games often get the distinct "console edition" moniker when they make such a jump.
Open The Gates
Once you get going, it is easy to appreciate Planet Coaster 2's strengths. Creating roller coaster tracks is effective at face value, as things like supports organically pop up to resemble a structurally sound attraction. The included Workshop in Planet Coaster 2 allows players to share their creations, and has varying levels of useful content even now, if you're a fan of pre-made structures and mod-style fabrications. Flat rides, mascots, and many themed decorations are easy and fun to use to your heart's content. When you build water-based attractions, the graphics truly shine, but it looks good across the board. The management aspect clearly showed what I needed to do, and once I found the menus to perform those actions, it became a non-issue. Powering through the aspects that initially pushed me away proved worthwhile enough.
The uncomfortable truth about the game is that Planet Coaster came out in 2016 and has benefited from eight years of DLC content in particular. The included slate of five themes cannot stand up to that level of support, but there seems to be a precedent for upcoming additions. Still, it is hard not to feel like these limitations slightly hamstrung your amusement park dreams, as they're very water-focused.
Oiling The Machine
For a solo experience, Planet Coaster 2 will take some time to learn, but can be rewarding because of that. It achieves that level of Zen that I was really hoping for in this type of management game: when your park is humming along mostly independently and you're planning your next big ride. Thankfully, it has the tools to realize those plans once you break through an admittedly significant barrier. If you can convince some friends to take on that challenge with you, there's also a competitive multiplayer mode allowing you and a group of friends to share a leaderboard of park metrics to determine who is the next magnate.
It adds up to a good game with a few shortcomings. For something with such a high level of customization and management, it's almost difficult to believe that things are as good as they are. A few more missteps would have had this game begging for a UI overhaul, but it's not quite that severe in its current state. Other strategic elements such as the power system end up being little more than busy work, and ultimately add little value to the experience. While I wish there were more themes, or a greater distinction between those themes, I will allow them the opportunity to make additions before judging how that strategy turns out. Most importantly for a simulation with hundreds of tiny people on screen: I didn't run into any performance issues, which surely helped me overcome the negatives. I can only imagine it is like starting an actual theme park, a bit of a grind, a ton of complexity, a large amount of choice, but a good pay off if you nail it.
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7.5
fun score
Pros
A great-looking strategy and management sim with high-level rollercoaster creation tools, brand new water park features, and tons of tertiary customization.
Cons
The interface is baffling at first, the power system mechanic ends up being unnecessary, and the limited number of themes are too similar to each other.
