Planet Coaster 2 Review (YoshiJoshi)
Absolutely incredible sequel to an already fantastic game series. It looks gorgeous the new quality of life features make creating theme parks a breeze. The new themes look amazing, coasters are smoother than ever and EVERYTHING in your parks is customisable. Some day-one performance issues and a janky UI shouldn't stop you from experiencing this truly joyful toybox of a game.
Game Changers
Water Parks
The pools in PlanCo2 could be an entire game in themselves but here they are fully integrated into the theme park experience. Build a dedicated water park with highly themed plummets of doom or add a relaxing lazy river to your theme parks for guests to chill in before their next coaster, the choice is yours.
Would love to see guests using the inflatables more often and hope to see side activities like and hot tubs and splash pads in the future.
Scaling
I cannot understate how much of a game changer the scaling tool is. I have used it in every build I have done so far. Every non-grid piece, including foliage, is now scaleable allowing you to easily create huge variety just using a single piece, just hit the C key and resize away. Most items can go between half and double their default size so you can use a giant inflatable to welcome guests into the park and then have smaller versions of that crab to keep guests company on their sun loungers.
I gather items have size limits due to textures and models looking distorted if scaled too much, but I say give us an option in the menu to disable scaling constraints, I can live with a pixelated texture if it means I can create the crab gift shop of my dreams!
Custom Themed Rides
Another feature I was blown away by was the ability to stick scenery pieces to any coaster car and any flat ride. In the original game the rides were highly themed and, while gorgeous, you couldn't really use the "Afternoon Tea" themed Teacups in your dragon's lair themed area of the park. Now though you can theme that ride however you like and the pieces will animate along with the ride seamlessly. Tools like mirroring and duplicating make theming a breeze and there are already
Currently you can't add scenery to tracked rides (trains, boats etc) so I'd like to see this added.
Moving Platforms
Something I have seen hardly anyone talking about is the addition of moving platform scenery pieces. These three pieces sitting quietly in your scenery tab give you the ability to turn any object into an animatronic... which is HUGE! There is a spinning, rising and side to side version of the platform all triggerable and all with different animation options. Stick your scenery pieces to the platforms and boom, you have an animated piece. Combine these with flat rides and coaster cars for some truly unique creations.
Under Construction
Paths
The new path system is revolutionary. Draw out huge plazas, place rides and shops directly onto the path, edit existing paths, all of these are great additions, I couldn't imagine going back to the old system from PlanCo1. I do think the path system could still do with some work though, there are some oversights/limitations that I'd love to see addressed:
- The Stamp tool isn't available for queues
- The brush doesn't always snap to existing paths
- You can't change a path from staff to regular to natural, you have to delete and redo it (even though the natural paths are listed along with regular paths)
The UI Sucks
All of the feedback about the UI being poor is warranted. The buttons sound great when you click them and the icons have all been redesigned and updated to fit the new graphical style, but the menus are a complete chore to click through.
- The Browser (main menu bar) is sometimes not visible, this should ALWAYS be visible and clickable across the bottom of the screen
- The pop out menus (pools, coasters etc) all require scrolling when there is plenty of room on the screen for the box to be bigger
- "Construction Mode" and "Edit Mode" for coasters and slides are separate for no reason at all
- Dropdown menus have been replaced with carousel menus (click left and right to switch between options but can only see one at a time), any option where you show less info to a user is worse in my book. Pools have 4 depths and I'm constantly clicking the wrong arrow and having to go around all the depths to find the one I want
- When holding C to scale, moving the mouse Up/Right is decrease size and Down/Left is increase size. Surely Up/Right are more associated with "bigger". The slider on the menu is configured to have Left be smaller and Right be bigger so it's not even consistent in game.
- When setting prices for items in shops every item opens in it's own separate screen
- You have to click confirm after you select a colour.
- You can't see the colour properly as the selected piece is highlighted blue.
- You have to click "done" twice to exit a scenery group (once to exit the item once to exit the group).
- You can't select a grid before you place a piece.
- If you copy a piece while inside a group, and exit the group, you loose the piece (in PC1 the piece would remain selected for you to place down)
- The multi select tool requires you to confirm a selection
- The multi select when in a scenery group doesn't support additive and subtractive selections but the tool outside of this does
Despite the above though the game is so good that it's barely bothered me at all. The good outweighs the bad in every sense and I trust Frontier's track record in supporting their games.
Wishlist
Just in case anyone from Frontier is reading...
Parades
This game is begging for parades! The ability to add scenery to coasters, rides and platforms is the perfect recipe for a parade system. Imagine you place a track with a start and end point, the cars are just empty platforms you can theme up, and guests gather as the cars go by... boom parade achieved! Let us trigger the parade at certain times and add entertainers to the cars to wave at the guests and we can achieve our most Disneyish dreams.
Photographs
The best part about exiting a ride is stopping at the photo booth and laughing at your terrified face as you went over the big drop. I would be delighted to see guests come off of rides and check out their on ride photos, I'm imagining a shop called "Happy Snaps" with an alligator mascot (think Gulpee with a camera), guests who have been on rides with photos enabled can stop at this shop and buy photo prints, keyrings and mugs as souvenirs. Throw in some roving photographer staff (the Diver character Sandy Reef already has a camera) and static photo spots (combined with character spots maybe?) and you've got some charming gameplay that also feeds into park management and income.
Weather Effects
Having weather in the game is great, I love seeing guests open umbrellas (RCT2 vibes) and love that sunburn is something you have to watch out for. I think it would be great for the weather to impact rides, some coasters should close during rain/lightning or high wind speeds. Guests could prefer covered rides during rain. Having this as toggleable option is a must though as it could get annoying in Sandbox mode.
The End
(I was only going to write a short paragraph...)