Planet Coaster 2 preview — corkscrewing our way this fall!

Yep. It’s real. After months of speculation and waiting in anticipation, – I’m happy to report that not only is Planet Coaster 2 good, but it’s coming soon! We got our first look at the game just recently, and as a Planet Coaster-obsessed fan myself I can assure you, it’s got absolutely everything we hoped it would. Let’s get started.

Right from the start of the demo, it was clear that the team has been listening intently to fan feedback. The opener shows a coaster next to a tube-style vertical-drop water slide where the rider stands on a platform that suddenly releases, shooting them into the waiting pool below. We see exactly that happen, with the rider splashing down in a huge pool with several other folks either swimming or lazily bobbing along on the surface. From here the game pans across to reveal a bunch of new features including teacups, hotels and facades, and so much more. Game Director Rich Newbold and Sr. Director Adam Woods sat down with us to show us what’s in store.

The first demo we saw was the new pool construction. You can build geometric shapes like squares and ovals, but you can also access a wide array of custom shapes as well. The body flume water slides are joined by corkscrew style flume rides, and other new swimming features, as well as new management features like shops to rent tubes and sell bathing suits, and new changing facilities to allow guests to get ready for the pool area. Can you charge for the privilege? Of course you can – it’s your park!

Just like your coaster, you can apply themes throughout, as well as placing transparent pieces into the tubes, letting other riders see the trapdoor section of your vertical drop, or an exciting corkscrew portion of the ride. Each of these rides will have an Excitement, Fear, and Nausea rating, just like your coaster, so you can expect to manage it accordingly.

On our way to the most exciting feature, I got a brief look at a ride that’s been in the news for all the wrong reasons – the Pendulum. Here you’ll be able to apply all sorts of deeper theme options, such as adding an aquatic theme inspired by deep sea exploration, complete with purple coral rocks and a giant semi-opaque octopus. Applying this same theme to the newly designed teacups and adjusting the color of the rocks, and then adding a few rustic barnacles and a crashed submarine changes the look and feel completely. Throw a few cogs onto it and now you’ve got a Jules Verne-inspired steampunk look.

Heading over to the teacups again we put a fresh coat of paint on the ride, but then saw a bunch of new queue customization options such as being able to apply a pattern to the frame, the cups, and other parts of the device to further theme it out. Stars, wavy shapes, shells, and more could be applied directly to the ride. Adding scenery to the ride itself is also possible. In fact, there’s little to stop you from attaching just about anything to…well, anything. Taking the submarine we’d applied full size to the outside of the park, we shrunk it down and attached it to the middle of an octopus ride. Similarly, we shrunk down an inner tube from the nearby slide and attached it to the front car of a coaster. You can even sink it into the surface, making it look like it was baked directly into it.

If you’ve ever struggled with getting your lights or objects to symmetrically attach or animate, you’ll be happy to see the new systems to help with decoration. Attaching a single light bar to the side of our coaster, we could scale it to whatever size we wanted, add patterns to the light stripe, angle it, and then simply hit the “twinning” option and ”mirror option” to apply it to the other side of the car, and then to every other car in that group. Clicking “Affect all trains” then hits every other car in the entire ride.

If all this isn’t enough, you can now add entire blueprints that you’ve created or downloaded, and they’ll inherit not only the look and feel of the rides to which they are attached, they’ll even inherit their movement. The ship on the octopus ride from earlier counter-rotated from the spinning arms, bringing it to life. Naturally, there are a metric ton of sliders and adjustments you can tinker with to adjust speed, motion, scale, and more – I can’t wait to see what sort of craziness fans come up with.

The biggest request users have been demanding since the launch of Planet Coaster is improvement to pathing. When you walk into a real-world theme park, you’ll find massive and sprawling concrete areas where guests can walk, congregate, get food, and just walk. You can do precisely that in Planet Coaster 2, painting massive parking lot sized concrete swaths, and then utilize them however you see fit. The example we saw reminded me of my local Six Flags over Texas as it has a massive open food court area. Here we have a fully themed Chief Beef food court, complete with flags, a sun shade, and seats for your guests to sit down and eat. We saw this throughout the park, with wider paths with carts, vendors, and other pavement-present opportunities inspired by the massive west coast surf shop areas you’d find on the beach or in between Disneyland and California Adventures.

Speaking of guests, they’ve received a massive overhaul. Guests now have a great deal more visual diversity and variety. You’ll see more families, loners, teens hanging out, couples without kids, dads and their daughters on daddy/daughter outings, and more. They also display a lot more emotion, shielding their eyes from the sun (go buy a hat!), getting an ice cream, and enjoying the park. We also got our first fleeting look at a lot more stats that live behind those guest behaviors, so it’ll be interesting to pull back the curtain to help satisfy their need to spend ALL of their money in my park.

Speaking of extracting money from your guests, you’ll be happy to know that those fake hotels and facades fans have been pretending to build in the first game can become a reality in Planet Coaster 2. We didn’t get to see them in action, but it joins a long list of other features that we only saw briefly. Fresh smoothing options, greater adjustments to the overall feel and fidelity of the coaster, a full power grid system will keep your rides powered, and you’ll need generators and pumps to keep clean water distributed to all your water rides. New roles for your mechanics to service this brand new infrastructure, Lifeguards to keep your guests safe, Janitors to keep your park clean (and dry!), fresh vendors, and even a new mascot, Queen Splash (a big Planet Coaster globe wearing a pool tube on her waist) joins the team.

The best news we got at this demo, however, was that we won’t have to wait long. The game is coming to consoles and PC in Fall of 2024! This was our first taste, but you know we’ll be keeping this one on our radar. After all, it’s our quote on the box for the first game – we kinda liked it. Stay locked here at GamingTrend and we’ll feed ya all the Chief Beef that’s fit to chew!

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