Planet Coaster 2 review: take the plunge

Offering you the chance to build a theme park (almost quite literally) brick by brick, Planet Coaster 2 builds on the series’ strengths and addresses some of its most glaring weaknesses. Couple these quality-of-life improvements with a brand new category of attraction – pools, flumes, and water parks – and it certainly seems to be offering a lot to a new generation of theme park fans.

As a creative person who shades on the obsessive side, I’ll admit I’m pretty much genetically predisposed to being a Planet Coaster 2 addict. The series offers almost complete creative freedom at the cost of hours spent meticulously arranging scenery parts and is almost pharmaceutically engineered to squirt dopamine around my pixel-addled brain. As a result, I’ve spent many hours boring the pants off my nearest and dearest about my latest rides and animal enclosures, to the extent I can almost hear the glop of their eyes glazing over as I talk.

But as the oenophile has the shrewdest expectations of the wine they imbibe and the true caffeine addict won’t sip anything other than locally roasted micro-lot beans from a tiny farm in El Salvador, I’ve also got pretty high expectations of my chosen vice. Both Planet Coaster and Planet Zoo helped me scratch my creative itch as PC games while also coming with some limitations that sometimes made me question my habit. So the announcement of Planet Coaster 2 did make me wonder: has developer Frontier Developments finally found a cleaner way for me to get my creative kicks?

Pool party

If you’ve seen any of the Planet Coaster 2 trailers, you’ll already be well aware of Frontier Developments’ big pitch for the sequel: water parks. In fact, in terms of new content, they are the only substantial addition the game brings. I was initially slightly nonplussed by this: could the inclusion of one new ride category encourage me to do any more than dip my toe into this sequel? Do pools and flumes really offer enough to justify sinking hours of my time into a new Planet game? In a word: yes. Yes, they do.

First of all, Planet Coaster 2 allows you to create a wide array of pools. Want to create a classy resort vibe, complete with cabanas, palm trees, and juice shacks? Or maybe you want to create a shallow kiddy pool, replete with donut-shaped swim rings and wave machines? You’re free to shape, customize, and decorate your pools however you like and, as in previous Frontier Developments titles, the only limit is your imagination. New tools allow you to carve out pools in any shape you desire, adjust the depth as you see fit, and adorn them with everything from sunloungers to beachballs.

Flumes also add a lot of fun to your water park. From basic chutes to gargantuan inner tube slides with switchbacks and speed bowls, you can create thrilling flumes that will draw more visitors to your pools. As with rollercoasters, they’re fully customizable – you’ll place them piece by piece, controlling both vertical and horizontal bends, adding special parts, and trying to hit that sweet spot between exciting and nausea-inducing that will encourage your guests to take the plunge.

As with your rollercoasters, your flumes will need to be tested before they can be opened, to make sure they provoke just the right amount of excitement and not too much nausea or fear. While testing you can view the results as they change from moment to moment or check out heatmaps of the whole ride to spot problem areas.

It’s not all fun and games though: you’ll also have to watch over your guests’ safety and make sure the water stays free of pe… err, dirt. Nobody’s at risk of drowning in Planet games – they’re far too cozy for that – but swimmers will panic, so you’ll need to make sure your pool is covered by lifeguards to help calm their distress. Meanwhile, you’ll have to add pool filtration to make sure that water remains crystal clear, hooking up water filters to flumes or to the pool itself.

Speaking of pipes, the utilities in Planet Coaster 2 have had an overhaul as well. While the original Planet Coaster was seemingly a Tesla-inspired free-energy utopia and Planet Zoo just required a generator plonking down here or there, hooking up power and water in Planet Coaster 2 requires a bit more thought. Not only will your generators and pumps need regular maintenance from your mechanics but the resulting electricity and water will need to be distributed around your park. Using underground wires and pipes, you’ll hook them up to power distributors and water filters, which will provide the required resources to everything within a set radius. It hardly requires Factorio levels of micromanagement and can easily be switched off but it adds a little extra realism to your parks.

In comparison to the water parks, traditional rides in Planet Coaster 2 have had much less of an overhaul. You can still design a wide array of rickety wooden coasters, water rides, and super-modern hanging coasters, as well as place thrilling flat rides and customize their sequences. They’re as fun as ever to design and integrate well with your water parks but, if you’re expecting a sea change here, you’ll be disappointed. However, I feel like the water parks add plenty of new challenges and creativity to the game and definitely justify picking up Planet Coaster 2 over firing up the original.

A smooth ride

As you might expect, Planet Coaster 2 has had a bit of a facelift compared to its eight-year-old predecessor.

Unsurprisingly, the most work has gone into improving water effects – lakes and beaches now look much more realistic, with the gradation between shallow and deep water looking much more true to life. Not only does the sunlight glimmer across the surface of your swimming pools but this casts underwater ripples across the ceramic tiles as well. All the water in the game feels like it’s had a literal glow up and it does help to add some visual polish to your waterparks and natural water alike.

Terrain textures too have received some love. There’s a wider variety than ever: alongside familiar terrain from Planet Zoo, like long and short grass, hard and soft rock, there are now multiple rock types, gravel, scree, and several densities of shrubbery, which help really add variation to the landscape. Whether I was creating small coves or craggy peaks, these extra textures really helped make the terrain look richer and more organic.

This ties in nicely with some of the new Scenery Themes, making it easier to match your landscape to various regions. As well as the classic theme park style, the new game also offers Viking, Mythological (read: Ancient Greece), Resort, and, predictably, Aquatic themes. Some of these are fantastic: Viking offers fantastic runic statues, Aquatic beautiful corals and the Greek pack allowed me to relive some of my favorite Aegean destinations.

However, I do miss the versatility of some of PlanCo’s original themes and the relative paucity of animatronics in the sequel does make sequencing ride scenery less exciting. Being able to perfectly program an explosion in a Wild West mine as a coaster roared past, complete with terrified miners leaping to escape the flames, was one of my favorite moments in the original and I hope new content packs will restore some of this creative potential.

I was expecting this graphical boost to have a noticeable impact on performance but I was pleasantly surprised. Playing on an Acer Predator Helios 300 with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080, I found my frame rate rarely ever dropped below 65 frames per second, even on the Ultra graphics settings. With all of its AI pathfinding and animal behavior, I found Planet Zoo could get pretty sluggish on some rigs, especially at high guest counts, but Planet Coaster 2 seems to run smoothly even on an older graphics card.

Not only that but, despite assuming the game would be an absolute no-go on the Steam Deck, it actually runs pretty adequately. Yes, your graphics settings will have to plunge like you’re on a drop tower but the game still runs smoothly, averaging out at a decent-for-Deck 30fps. How true this will remain when you’re working with Disney World-sized parks remains to be seen but it shows there has been some effort to optimize things behind the scenes.

Breaking new paths

As someone who has sunk thousands of hours into the original Planet Coaster and Planet Zoo, I’ll be the first to admit that they can be… a little idiosyncratic. It’s become something of an inside joke among fans of the series that the games offer almost unlimited creative potential while also forcing you to butt heads with some frustrating design limitations. Paths and scenery placement in particular have drawn ire for being unnecessarily convoluted.

To its credit, Frontier Developments has tackled some of these complaints head-on in Planet Coaster 2. Object placement has received some much-needed love: you can now turn Snap Distances on and off for all objects, meaning you’re no longer forced to keep building parts on a grid but can also set props to move in relation to the grid when you want. And the new Scale Tool allows you to tweak the size of individual items, something I’ve been desperate to see for a long time, and makes it much easier to create organic variations in the sizes of objects. All in all, this adds a great deal of flexibility to the Blueprints you can create.

There are also plenty of labor-saving tweaks that have been made: the new scenery brush groups together similar items like tropical trees or Mediterranean rocks and quickly paints them across the landscape. You can also easily create your own presets by adding a selection of scenery items. The end result definitely requires some editing to get it looking natural but, as someone who has spent many hours in Planet Zoo getting each collection of bushes and stones looking just right, automating a part of this process is definitely something I appreciate.

In past games, paths were easy to place in general and maddeningly difficult to place in specific circumstances – anyone who has also lost a whole evening trying to stack paths on top of each other in multi-story buildings shares my pain here. Fortunately, path placement has had a complete overhaul: in addition to the Classic Paths tool, there is now an overhauled Line Builder tool, options to manually draw the edges of paths line by line, a Stamp Builder tool to place geometrically shaped paths, and an Edit tool to manually tweak paths point by point. This gives you a whole lot more variability in terms of the shapes of path you can create, making plazas, buildings, and a whole heap more much easier to create.

Water mechanics have previously been this series’ Achilles heel: creating natural ponds, rivers, and lakes was always a bit of a finicky process, often requiring a lot of tinkering before the games would acknowledge water placement as valid. Fortunately, Planet Coaster 2’s swimming pools utilize the new path mechanics – you can carve out pools using shapes or manually set their boundaries by drawing lines, then round their edges using the Smooth Brush. Depth is set according to presets at first – either shallow, wading, swimming, or diving – but you can set the depth to whatever you want with the Edit tool. And you can add paths around the edges automatically using the Customize Brush.

All in all, these features go a long way to reducing the slog involved in perfecting your park.

Off the rails

This isn’t to say that some of Frontier Developments’ more eccentric tendencies aren’t on display: you’ll definitely encounter bugs and odd design choices here and there.

Designing rollercoasters is still that same combination of childlike delight and frustratingly finicky refinement. Having spent roughly 20 minutes designing an old-school log flume that wound through forests, plunged down mountainsides, and splashed through salt lakes, I was pretty happy with my handiwork. But I then had to spend at least another 30 minutes closing the loop: there’s no auto-complete function for certain rides and trying to get the returning track on the same height as the station platform required a tedious process of trial and error.

Ride testing has also maintained some of its irksome habits from the original. Any time I’ve attempted a coaster or flume of significant ambition, it still required a high degree of testing and tweaking to keep speed and G-forces within safe limits. And there are still some glitches here. One of my early flumes repeatedly tested as being around a 15 in terms of fear overall – a bowel-liquefying level of terror that wouldn’t allow me to open the ride – despite the fact heatmaps showed the fear didn’t hit much higher than a 6. I’d imagine minor bugs like this will be fixed in future patches but it can be confusing trying to work out whether your design is at fault or an unpatched bug.

But, as I say, I’d maintain these kind of issues are the flipside of the creative freedom Planet Coaster 2 offers. What I’ve come to expect from the Planet series of games is the ability to create pretty much whatever I want and an inevitable side effect of trying to create something the developer never anticipated is the fact I may run up against the odd hard limit where the engine struggles to deliver what I’ve asked for. Ultimately: with great flexibility, comes great errors.

Should I play Planet Coaster 2?

Play it if…

Don’t play it if…

Accessibility

Planet Coaster 2 has a reasonable number of accessibility options, although perhaps there’s room for improvement too. You can scale the interface if you find smaller type hard to read and can tweak color palettes to improve readability if you have protanopic, deuteranopic, or tritanopic color blindness.

For those who have auditory processing problems, you can set the game to mute all other audio when narrative dialogue is playing. Meanwhile, for those with reduced hearing in one ear, you can switch on a mono mix to ensure you’re receiving all sounds.

However, you don’t seem to be able to adjust gamepad controls, which might make things harder for those who require certain tweaks to be able to use controllers.

How I reviewed Planet Coaster 2

I sank over 23 hours into playing Planet Coaster 2. I tried to cover as much of the game as possible, dividing my time between Career Mode, Franchise Mode, and Sandbox Mode. I tried the game out on Low, High, and Ultra graphics settings.

In terms of hardware, I played Planet Coaster 2 on an Acer Predator Helios 300 with a 12th-gen Intel Core i9-12900H CPU and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 GPU. During this testing, I used the laptop’s built-in keyboard and an external Logitech B100 mouse. I also played the game for hours on my LCD Steam Deck.

My past experience of the Planet series of games includes almost 400 hours on the original Planet Coaster and over 1,000 hours on Planet Zoo.