Planet Coaster 2 Channels RollerCoaster Tycoon With New Thrills

As someone who prefers high-adrenaline rollercoasters over the teacups, visiting amusement parks can be thrilling and Planet Coaster 2 understands this well. Building your own park in the original Planet Coaster remains entertaining eight years later, something Frontier Developments hopes to build upon with new water park rides, improved visuals, and better construction tools. I recently went hands-on with the PC version, and I’m confident the upcoming sequel will be worth the admission.

Anyone familiar with Planet Coaster or Planet Zoo will feel right at home, and your goal remains drawing in visitors to earn as much money as possible. This preview showcased two of the three upcoming modes – Sandbox Mode offers a pleasing level of freedom with unlimited cash for flat rides, rollercoasters, and more, while Career Mode feels designed as a gradual introduction to these gameplay mechanics.

Starting with the Career Mode’s third chapter, what follows is the type of strangely enjoyable challenge you’d only ever find in fiction. A rival theme park builder has bought land within your park and imposed unusual construction restrictions, which forces you to find creative workarounds. Career Mode uses a ranking system that swaps the original Planet Coaster’s star rankings for up to four medals, and clearing the initial ‘Bronze’ challenges is unsurprisingly easy.

This mission highlights the new water attractions well, which offer more excitement than the original game’s log flumes. You can now set down pools and water slides wherever you like, adding some welcome variety. Slides always require a landing pool underneath them, or you can create a separate large pool for guests to use at their leisure. Just make sure you have enough lifeguards on duty. Surrounding them with lovely scenery increases a ride’s prestige rating, though it’s a slightly shallow approach as you can dump anything around those rides without consistent theming.

As someone who struggles with creating interesting custom creations, using pre-designed rides via the blueprints system over making your own is undoubtedly helpful. However, some noticeably fiddly gameplay mechanics hamper this. Connecting your theme park guests to each ride requires laying down paths, yet they don’t always connect despite stopping right in front of a ride or theme park entrance. It’s slightly frustrating as I can’t tell what I’m doing wrong in these moments. Thankfully, new paving methods like drawing and stamping tools make the wider process more convenient.

Powering up rides needs a delicate balance as placing generators too close to an attraction can reduce the prestige, but placing them further away means the mechanic needs longer to reach them. Creating a park and letting things run isn’t enough; you need staff and facilities, but wages and construction come at a cost. Still, rising to the challenge can feel rewarding, even if effectively spaced land development is not my specialty.

Watching these rides in action shows how closely the team paid attention to real-life rollercoaster designs, and that’s particularly clear from the first-person camera. Instead of just watching from above like some omnipotent adrenaline-fuelled deity, you can swap perspectives and witness a ride unfold in either testing or while it’s actively open. That’s nothing new for the sequel, but seeing these rides in action has me itching to book Thorpe Park and Alton Towers tickets. How much care Frontier is giving Planet Coaster 2 is immediately clear.

I also enjoy how you can customize rollercoaster trains with additional designs, such as light bars on the side. Duplicating these across the entire set of trains at once is also helpful, keeping designs consistent while removing any potential tedium doing that for every individual cart would involve. An option to create custom trains and original mascots would be nice, though the existing choices on both aspects are still great.

Though Planet Coaster 2 doesn’t completely flip the script, evolutionary gameplay changes and visual upgrades mean building your theme park feels better than ever. I hope Frontier will address my more minor frustrations, yet this hands-on session shows the potential of the upcoming amusement park sim. I’ll be keen to check out more when Planet Coaster 2 launches on November 6 for PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PS5.