As a passionate fan of both Planet Coaster and Rollercoaster Tycoon 3: Soaked, the excitement I felt upon the reveal ofPlanet Coaster 2was palpable. The addition of swimming pools and water park elements alongside the presence of normal rides and rollercoasters is a gift I welcomed.
When I was given the chance tospeak to game director Rich Newbold and senior executive producer Adam Woods, who also walked me through a hands-off preview, my excitement only increased. When the time came to play it for myself, the main thing consuming my thoughts was “well, that was embarrassing.”
My first mistake was letting the developers know that I’ve played their games before. Maybe I should have tried to convince them I was completely new to all this. Then it might not have been quite so mortifying to accidentally trap 300 people in a changing room, because apparently I still can’t build a path properly. Although, it’s not like I did anything else shameful. Well, mostly.
This isn’t to say the game is to blame. Frontier is well aware that some of its building tools can be tricky, and in Planet Coaster 2, it’s taken steps to try and make the creation tools both more customisable and easier to use, for hardcore players and newcomers alike.
Building Pools And Placing Paths
The first part of the preview centered on the campaign and involved building a pool and increasing its prestige. There are a few pool blueprints which help get you started, so I placed one and hoped for the best. I soon discovered that guests love a good pool as much as I do. This one had a handful of sunbeds and a striped flume ride which twisted majestically before evicting its riders into a perfectly constructed but very tiny pool. Classic water park stuff.
For guests to enter the pool area, you need to construct an information kiosk to sell pool passes, and a changing room for them to throw on bathing suits, so I diligently placed these and connected everything with paths. At least that’s what I thought I’d done.
As I started looking at linking up a second pool to handle the overflow, I realised that the crowds weren’t looking as large as before. That’s when I noticed that somehow my paths had been built at slightly different heights. This meant that, in typical sim-game style, around 300 guests had decided that they could not manage the two-inch step and needed instead to walk around in a circle in and out of the changing rooms for all eternity. I had created a wet and wild purgatory.
I tried to fix the paths but ended up confusing myself, which I think is down to the new path system, or should I say systems. Building paths has always been the thing I’ve hated most in Planet Coaster, so this trapped guest scenario is not new to me.
Choosing a path and sticking to it has never been more valid. Just because you have several ways to do something doesn’t mean that using them all is better. Stick with the first option, the most automated one, and life will be easier.
In an effort to make building paths easier, Planet Coaster 2 has added several ways to build them. One method mostly auto places things for you, with a few caveats, while another places paths in small increments, and a third stamps paths like terrain. Each method also has different adjustments you can make to how it functions. In an effort to learn how to path effectively and overcome my hatred of them, I had tried to test them all. Big mistake. Big. Huge.
So here I was having to delete my patchwork puzzle of different height paths in a panic while a lovely Frontier dev very patiently suggested I stick to one kind of path and walked me through the new system. Once I got the paths under control, the changing room prisoners were liberated, and I could go back to my pool.
Adding Prestige Rather Than Prisoners
I was too scared to build an extra pool from scratch just yet, especially since we hadn’t been near a tutorial, so I placed a large empty one and customised it. Many of the controls are familiar, but there are also some welcome quality of life adjustments, such as the inclusion of the radial menu from the console version, alongside the regular one.
As with the original game, it feels like there’s a learning curve, but a slightly different one to the previous entry. Buildings and scenery are placed and built in the same basic ways, so that knowledge was transferable, but extra options, especially with the paths, does mean that not everything is quite as intuitive as I expected initially.
There is a wide range of both new and returning rides and coasters, all presented in exquisite detail, and I am absolutely in love with the new aquatic and mythology decor themes.
When we were moved into sandbox mode for the second part of the preview, I focused somewhat on pools but mainly on trying to explore other new options. As I dared to experiment with the pools again, I managed to shame myself once more, but this time I think I got away with it.
Note To Self: Remember Pool Ladders And Jets
I love a lazy river, so I decided that this would be a great addition to my basic pool. It’s placed using the path mechanism again, but this time I wasn’t phased and managed to make a nice winding river. It was beautiful, but also, unbeknownst to me, accidentally fatal. I pivoted to rides again and got distracted by the new scenery and the discovery of a mythology theme, before considering checking in on my pool.
As it turns out, if you make your lazy river too long people can’t get all the way around. They may have actually drowned, but I was too scared to check the status of the tiny pixel people waving in distress, and instantly moved on to something else, trying to hide the shameful chaos. Lazy rivers it seems, can be the Planet Coaster 2 equivalent of removing a pool ladder in The Sims.
An Increase In Management
There are employable lifeguards to help prevent drownings - although I think my lone figure had his work cut out for him. This is part of a wider theme where more micromanagement is involved. As expected, blueprints will remove some of this, but your park will require more input to thrive than before, which will either be a blessing or a curse, depending on your tastes.
As well as providing food, drinks, toilets, benches and bins, you’ll need to keep changing rooms clean, pools filtered, and scenery maintained. You’ll also need to check things like the jets in the lazy river, the queues for the coasters, and the safety of the flumes. It’s a lot, but it’s a good change, bringing the same depth to park management as we saw in zoo management with Planet Zoo.
While it’s difficult to get an in-depth feel for Planet Coaster 2 in the short time I had, it’s certainly been enough to whet my appetite and make me want to play again. Hopefully, next time I won’t accidentally strand 300 guests somewhere or get anyone killed. But where’s the fun in that?
Planet Coaster is set to release on May 19, 2025, for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X and is available to pre-order now.
