Sometimes when I play strategy games, I can’t help feeling like I’m clocking into work. Managing roads, budgets, and garbage collection in Cities Skylines 2 is brutally hard. The pressures of leadership in Civilization and Manor Lords are relentless. I like depth and detail, and a sense that everything I achieve is the product of ingenuity and time, but ‘fun’ in 4X and RTS games is highly subjective. Enter Planet Coaster 2. From Theme Park to RollerCoaster Tycoon, ScreamRide and beyond, the amusement builder has been a staple of strategy and PC gaming. What Frontier has achieved, at least based on my initial play test, is a smart mix of all the genre’s mechanical staples topped with an unusual, unbridled joy.
The tone may be colorful and welcoming, but Planet Coaster 2 is so well researched, and its building systems so granular and expansive, that it almost feels like an engineering simulator. Let’s take the example of building a swimming pool, surely the simplest attraction imaginable in the strategy game. If I want to, I can lay the swimming pool out yard by yard, creating a custom outline completely of my own design. Alternatively, there are several prefabs available – but even those offer boundless options for personalization and detailing.
There are different types of wave machine, diving board, even pool toys and loungers. If I want to boost the ‘prestige’ of my first ever amusement, I can also add slides and flumes. And even when it’s built, it needs changing rooms, a proper path that connects it to the rest of the would-be park, and I can adjust entry prices and allot lifeguards and cleaners to maintain safety and water quality. And this is just a swimming pool.
Water-based attractions are the major addition to Planet Coaster 2, and they’ve been given the same attention to detail as the more elaborate rides and other systems that made the original game a hit on Steam. “The challenge is the authenticity,” senior executive producer Adam Words tells me. “Adding water parks, that means more attention to detail. We’ve also got a rich history in rollercoaster games, all the way back to RCT 3. A lot of people who worked on that, and also ScreamRide, are working on Planet Coaster 2. We’ve got an awful lot of experience in this. It’s based on the fact that we love theme parks ourselves.”
An experienced Skylines, SimCity, and Theme Park player, it nevertheless takes me a good 30 minutes to create and cut the ribbon on a working swimming pool. It’s not because Planet Coaster 2 is fussy or obtrusive. This is a building game where you have to learn, experiment with, and gradually master the myriad systems for engineering. To labor a metaphor, like a roller coaster, there’s a steep incline right at the beginning, a potentially intimidating difficulty curve that – if you’re new to the series – might seem insurmountable. But stick with it, and eventually you reach the parabolic brow, and the pleasure of creating, and seeing the happiness among all your customers, gives you momentum.
“With the original, we saw that a lot of different people wanted to play in lots of different ways,” Wood continues. “There’s a deep and rich simulation, but it also allows you to quite quickly build a park that looks fantastic. We still have the piece-by-piece functions that people love from the original Planet Coaster, but also layer on options, depending what your playstyle is.”
When it comes to building my very first ‘coaster, I skip the prefabs completely – the swimming pool was tough going for a while, but it’s inducted me into the sectional building and customization tools sufficient that I feel ready for a challenge. I go simple, a long vertical incline that tips into a short, steep, and very fast plunge towards the ground.
It’s a hackneyed idea, but it passes testing and the punters line up. Unfortunately, everybody who steps off my first creation (in homage to both its precipitous decline and its questionable quality, I call it ‘The Nadir’) is instantly, violently sick. I’m told the ride is too frightening, and after some liberal – and slightly passive aggressive – deployment of the ‘delete ride section’ tool, I return to the drawing board.
It’s at this stage, typically, that strategy games have the power to frustrate. You’ve perfected your plan for world domination. You’ve visualized the perfect road network, and painstakingly adjusted taxes for years to finally pay for its construction – and then it all falls apart. In Planet Coaster 2, though, I find it very hard to feel downtrodden. It’s deep, complex, and challenging, but ultimately it’s a game about building a theme park. As such, it feels like a clever hybrid of game design sensibilities, mechanically challenging, open to interpretation and agency, but always playful and tonally light.
“My own personal experience of some of those earlier [park-building] games was being inspired by the management aspects, adjusting prices or concessions and seeing how that would alter the simulation,” game director Rich Newbold explains. “But there are so many different aspects of the theme park, not just the management, but the creation. The development team is full of theme park and water park enthusiasts. That inspires us to bring these amazing things from reality into Planet Coaster 2.”
When you want to drill into the close analysis, the hardcore design and building, and micromanagement, Planet Coaster 2 has an extensive collection of systems and tools that allow for that approach. When you want to take it easier, and just enjoy making and toying with something, that’s possible, too. The Planet Coaster 2 release date is set for Wednesday November 6. From what I can tell, it’s a well-pitched blend of simulation and satisfaction, a strategy game where wholesale investment in all of the intricacies is just as encouraged as raw fun.
While we wait for Planet Coaster 2, try some of the other best 4x games, or maybe get the best grand strategy games available on PC.
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