Not only does Planet Coaster 2 add water parks but there are plenty of quality of life improvements that make building your dream park a delight.
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.
