Planet Coaster 2 hands-on preview — Let’s take a dip in the pool!

Nobody sets out to make an unsafe water park. Nobody plans on having water slides with tubes spilling into the same pool that has little kids swimming in it. But when Kenta Suzuki hired Mr Oswald B. Thompson and gave us a list of restrictions on how our park was to be constructed, I was given little choice. Recently I went to the first hands-on event for Planet Coaster 2 and ended up making the most unsafe park in America. Before another kid gets smacked in the head by an inflated unicorn floatie, let’s talk about my hands-on time with Planet Coaster 2.

During this session, I got to play around with one of the most anticipated aspects of the game – the all-new water features. In the scenario I played, Oswald B. Thompson has signed a contract to work with rival Kenta Suzuki on a wildly-unfinished park with an interesting concept. You see, Suzuki is not an honest negotiator, and is in fact, a competitor. He tied Thompson (and us!) into a contract where we have to put certain rides on one side, but not on the other, and vice versa. His little attempt at sabotage will fail though – we’re experienced park builders, and we’ve got this!

The Bronze Medal, dubbed “Park Half Full” asks us to construct a pool on Kenta’s side, build it to 450 prestige, and also have two flumes – a new ride for the series. Those prestige ratings are amalgamations of scenery ratings, number of guests, and cleanliness, as well as a splash of what guests think about the ride, of course. Happy guests are paying guests, so let’s make them happy.

The first item I constructed, naturally, was a pool. I looked at a few pre-built blueprints in the interests of time. Like its predecessor, all of the assets were built using the same tools players will have, so you can construct something just as complex and awesome, if you take the time. Building tools are just as complex as ever if you want to dig into the really advanced bits to construct your own, but incredibly easy to build from scratch. Whether you plop one down or drop them, a new feature is that they will automatically come with the right person for the job pre-assigned. This ensures you’ve got the right amount of people to run your park, though you can try to pinch pennies and tinker with schedules and overlap, asking your staff to rotate to keep coverage as close to perfect as possible. A new vision cone lets you see, for example, what your lifeguards can cover. A completely revamped heatmap system will be a powerful tool for folks who like to truly manage their park, rather than just overstaff it.

There are a few new guest services items in the game. Your guests will need to be able to change into their bathing suits (and yes, you can charge them – how evil of you!), and they’ll want to partake of things like pool floaties and beach towels. These new shops are a fresh new thing to manage, and manage you will with the new management system. You can use a scheduling system to space out your staffers, or run them at 1:1 as you see fit. Frankly, I just didn’t have time to dig into this, or the new system that looks like a paintbrush to tell your staff where to go, but I’m excited to see it improve over the old menu-based version.

Another addition to the formula is the introduction of power and filtering. Your rides require power, and generators and power distribution nodes help you get juice where you need it. Similarly, your pools will need filtration, and you can use a very similar tool to scrub them clean. Matching tools tell you how much power you are using as well as how much scrubbing capacity your device has left in it before something needs to be done.

One of the other new features is a completely revamped pathing system. A challenge in the first game, the team looked over fan feedback extensively, and when combined with their own internal targets, arrived at a new system that is far more powerful than before. As it was in the first game, you are free to draw your paths just about anywhere and it’ll connect to whatever is nearby. What’s new is that when you get close, some intersection tools that look almost like a math compass or T-square. This helps you see how the connection to the next item will seam together. Additionally, now you can see which chunks are intersecting and causing problems, allowing you to adjust accordingly. There are seven line types, as well as two more tabs for additional customizations like color and texture, giving me plenty to look forward to at launch.

Laying down paths, I could already feel the improvements. I purposely built terrible pathing and watched as the game sewed them together. I purposely put paths next to each other that would normally have a frustrating gap between them only for the engine to see what I was doing and give it a nice smooth combined path. One of the things the team was most excited about, and you see it in their recent trailers, is the ability to create an entire pavilion – massive walkaround plazas where your guests can shop, eat, and enjoy some downtime before heading back to your rides.

It’s a terrible idea, but I did confirm with the team that yes – you could pave your ENTIRE park with paths, covering every square inch, and it’ll work. You’ll have to carve out sections for queues and the like, and it’s likely you’ll end up with congestion as guests walk through your park haphazardly, but you are free to do as you please – the new pathing system is that good.

Popping over to the sandbox I was free to make whatever I wanted, and that’s precisely what I did – safety being wildly unimportant. Did I make an Olympic sized pool and then throw raft-riding guests in it from such a height that they came off at a 45 degree angle with their arms flailed to the side? I’m gonna guess the fear rating on that ride is rather high. Did I make an open-faced flume system that had such a steep-but-short drop that it could only drill into the ground? You bet.

We only had about 90 minutes with the game, but already I can see that the Frontier team has put a great deal of work and love into the Cobra engine. Gorgeous physics-based water, the effects sequencer, a completely refreshed staff management system, all new lighting and effects, a huge new roster of coasters and other rides, the new cross-platform space to share your creations, and so much more is simply more than we had time for today. The great news is that you won’t have to wait long – Planet Coaster 2 launches simultaneously on PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5 on November 6th, and I can’t wait to see what all of you come up with next!

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