Planet Coaster 2 review by jeuxvideo.com

What are water parks for?

Let's start with the most striking new feature: the arrival of swimming pools and other slides. The aquatic counterpart of the amusement park, popular in the real world to justify longer stays in entertainment resorts, offers an additional dimension to the game. These new aquatic points, associated with an overall improvement in graphics, particularly on lighting effects, allows the game to present a warm aesthetic that makes you want to go on vacation. If the different types of slides are few in number, less than ten in total, we will appreciate the few welcome elements in swimming pools, such as the possibility of choosing the depth, adding waves, or creating “lazy rivers” , these courses where bathers let themselves be carried along canals, pushed by the currents. We can imagine with relish the immersive results – in every sense of the word – that could benefit from this functionality.

But we shouldn't reduce Planet Coaster 2 to its swimming pools, although that is the obvious marketing strategy for a game that needs a “wow” factor to justify a sequel. We feel, implicitly, the desire to make a new Planet Coaster, more successful and more complete. The game is gaining in stability and seems to be much more able to support the thousands of visitors who browse your most complex constructions. We will note slowdowns in the construction menus, the display of which can cause slight freezes on the densest parks. It's much less annoying than the incessant jerks of the first opus, but we still hope that a patch will smooth everything out.

Parks and re-creations

The entire construction aspect has been magnified and enriched. The first Planet Coaster seems to have served as a big draft for the 2, which aims to give full control to the player over what they want to do. The possibilities are dizzying… literally! Every building element can be edited, down to a blade of grass or a bolt in a building. The nice surprise comes from the customization of the “rides”, the “flat rides” we should rather say, which are now offered as functional carcasses that you can dress up as you wish. One downside, no real “ride” (a carousel, an airplane ride… Anything that rotates around an axis) is offered. We will therefore be satisfied with the Cups to let our creativity shine… Or pay for the “vintage attractions pack” extra to access the carousel. However, let's be fair, the game offers a significant number of attractions and these few shortcomings will not hinder your creativity.

Management under the microscope

On the management side, attention to detail is also king: each staff schedule can be optimized according to the time and location of the employee, knowing that even the attraction operator must now be managed. If he goes on break, the attraction no longer works! Weather is important, and if you don't provide a roof over a queue or an umbrella over a picnic table, if it rains, visitors will go elsewhere. We could list like this many details that you can manage, both in construction and in managementbut we will content ourselves with one last very telling example. You can determine the menu of your fast food restaurants. But your visitors have a certain number of allergies or intolerances, some are vegetarians… Your dishes may contain dairy products, gluten, and many other elements likely to be refused by your visitors. Each region has a percentage of visitors who are intolerant to this or that element, so ideally this should be taken into account… It's staggering, perhaps discouraging.

And that's the whole dilemma of the game. On the one hand, it wants to allow you to choose the gameplay you want : park management down to the smallest micro aspect, creation of magnificent settings that you can share online (compatible between PC and consoles), creation of a hyper faithful roller coaster which takes into account the most modern advances in the field (let’s place the terms “Switch track” and “Drop track” here, specialists will appreciate it!), creation of a complete park just using predefined elements or shared by the community… All this is possible! As long as you manage to master the game tools.

Rides that exercise the brain

Because, let's be honest, Planet Coaster 2 is a difficult game to learn. The very good idea comes from the two tutorial missions and then from the career mode, which offers around twenty scripted missions in pretty environments or parks already started to learn on the job and have a lot of fun. But it's difficult to succeed in doing what you really want. We rail against the interface, which is unclear; we discover essential options very late (there is a flashlight that can be activated in the “time of day!” section); certain essential elements are never presented to the player… It's a game that will make “tutorial” videos very popular! But we can't help but be frustrated.

We hold a very powerful tool in our hands', capable of easily producing a forest, raising a mountain of rock in its center, then building a stunning roller coaster, the train itself of which can be personalized with any element; to be able to provide it with an interactive journey, with explosions, lasers or animatronics which are all triggered in a precise order exactly when a train passes; to create a pretty building for its station with advanced details; to manage your queue, your fast passes, your price, your maintenance and your operations, in short we CAN do all that, but everything seems so complicated, everything can go so wrong without us realizing itand, damn, it's been five minutes that the poorly arranged menu has been hiding from us this element of customization that we need so much… And when we finally open our roller coaster and it turns out to be “too scary” because of A poor, poorly negotiated turn is annoying! Everything can be caught and repaired, but to do things right, you will need to be patient…

The multi, in all honesty

But let's not end on a negative note and talk about the franchise system. Creating an online multiplayer park is a fantasy rarely achieved, except by a few ambitious amateur projects. Planet Coaster 2 tries its luck once again with a mode that allows you to form or join a franchise, a sort of guild of park creators. Everyone can build one or more parks in the world, on predefined lands which each have their own biome, research possibilities or starting finances. Better yet, other members of the Franchise can come and modify someone else's park… But not at the same time! A version system, a bit like a Wikipedia page, allows the creator of the park to see what has been modified in his absence, and to choose whether or not to keep these changes. And to push the guild to progress, challenges are proposed, for example generating as much money as possible in all the parks. A ranking is established with other guilds and cosmetic rewards are up for grabs. Note that this is also a way to see other parks created by other players from around the world, to visit them by placing yourself at a height or in the place of a visitor, to test their attractions… And, in real life , it's almost a game in its own right because fan creations can be so magnificent!

Conclusion