Sparky's Blog

Content warning: Due to the nature of the game, I will make mention of food at various points, in the context of options available for park guests to purchase.

For my first proper blog post, it's time to talk about a topic that inspired me to go down this rabbit hole to begin with: The sequel to Planet Coaster.

I have been playing it a bit the past couple of days, and... frankly, I am having very mixed thoughts on it.

Note: I am presently ~24 hours into the game, and have mostly been building up my version of “Main Street”. I haven't yet touched the waterparks or the coasters.

I do like it, similar to how I like Rollercoaster Tycoon 1, 2 and 3, OpenRCT, Parkitect and and the first Planet Coaster (I just really like building amusement parks🤷), however the more I play it, the more I am starting to edge against some of its quirks and limitations. Presently, not enough to make me stop playing it, and in a way it's fun to work around the annoyances. But to be honest, it feels a bit like it's secretly an Early Access game.

Personally, these are my biggest gripes thus far though:

1. A lack of variety in shops (compared to PlanCo 1 and even RCT2)
2. Restaurants feel like they are barely implemented
3. Both restaurants and souvenir shops have some odd limitations

So, let's go through my thoughts on those in order:

A lack of variety in shops

Compared to the original Planet Coaster, the selection in shops in Planet Coaster 2 is, frankly, lacking. Sure, you got some major ones – Chief Beef for burgers, Gulpee for soda, and even a new shop or two in Viva La Vegan and Splash Emporium, however they got rid of some options that I see as staples of theme parks – Monsieur Frites for fries, Missy Good for sweet baked goods, Sugary Emporium for candy, that sorta thing. Granted, a fair few of those were added to Planet Coaster 1 as part of the World's Fair Pack, but even if they didn't want to “give it away for free”, I am sure they could figure something out. (Outside of pulling a Sims and making us pay for the same DLC all over again...)

Also, I think neither have an option to sell popcorn to guests, which I think could have opened some interesting synergies by also letting you sell novelty popcorn buckets in souvenir shops. Same with turkey legs, which I hear are a staple over at Backwards-Gisney parks.

Granted, you probably wouldn't be able to tell what the guests are eating anyway, unless you go out of your way to zoom in on them, but I still like to immerse myself while building my parks, and offer my guests vaguely thematically-appropriate foodstuffs based on where in the park they are.

But that wouldn't be much of an issue if Restaurants were able to pick up the slack instead. Speaking of...

Restaurants feel like they are barely implemented

So far, they are the feature that disappointed me the most. Sure, you can plonk down a “kitchen”, and watch your peeps eat on a table. That is neat.

However, the only things you can serve are sandwich-looking things, lasagna-looking things, salad-looking things, and curry-looking things. You can rename them as you wish, and toggle which ingredients they are made of (from options such as meat, fish, veggies, gluten, etc.), but you cannot serve food that looks different from those four options.

Granted, as mentioned earlier: You'd have to zoom on to even tell what they're eating, so from a distance it would make literally no difference if they got lasagna, “quesadilla”, or “delicious, jelly-filled donuts” on their plate, and in a pinch you could always stick with look-alikes (like maybe gratin instead of lasagna, or some kinda stew instead of curry), but I would prefer to at least have the option to switch it to other food that's already in the game anyway.

Also, even if they let the peeps order more visually diverse food: Given they are leaning more into the resort side of things in Planet Coaster 2, I think they are missing one thing entirely from restaurant:

Buffets and salad bars.

Whenever I see a review of someone staying at a park's hotel, they tend to bring up breakfast buffets. As such, I think it would've been nice if we had been given the option to plonk down a buffet tray block that is self-service for the guests, but requires regular fill-ups or replacements from a staff member. Granted, it's completely minor, but I still would have loved to see it – even if, presently, it'd just serve sandwiches, lasagna, curry and salad.

There is a second quirk that is also a headscratcher though:

Both restaurants and souvenir shops have some odd limitations

So, let's assume that I took no issues with the limited selection of restaurants in Planet Coaster 2, and I built a larger one, so it could accommodate many guests at once. Then I would quickly run into an issue in which I can only assign a limited number of tables to a given restaurant.

Okay, fair – it makes sense that you cannot spread a kitchen too thinly across too many tables.

But you can assign multiple kitchen blocks to the same restaurant. So, doing that would logically increase the number of tables you can have... right?

Nah. It might improve throughput, but it does nothing to the table limit.

Same with souvenir shops (which, by the way, is where I think they could've nicked the code for buffets from) – any given souvenir shop can only have so many shelves. You can add multiple cash registers to a souvenir shop, but the limit is fixed.

The “solution”/workaround to both is to instead have multiple shops/restaurants in the same building, with each having different tables/shelves assigned, which is a bit silly. (Imagine going to a shop, picking an item from a shelf and heading to the nearest cashier, just to be told that that particular item has to be paid at the next cashier over – people would complain immediately, and rightfully so.)

At least souvenir shops seem to have a rich variety in items that can be sold based on the shelves you have in the shop, so I can complain less there. (Maybe that would be a way to fix it with restaurants, too? Split the “kitchen” block from the counter, and offer different kitchens for different cuisine? That one's free, Frontier.)

Some things I like in Planet Coaster 2

But it's not all doom and gloom in that game.

For one, I like how seamless the workshop integration in this one is. It also makes it vendor-independent, versus the Steam Workshop, which (naturally) requires you to have bought the game on Steam. Unfortunately, it still relies on Someone Else's Computer, but the same would've been true for the Steam Workshop (though Frontier would have to actively turn that one off, and can't just keep it running indefinitely at no extra cost). Though, I think it's a shame that they're not allowing custom geometry anymore. The community can still make a lot of great stuff by essentially kitbashing the existing assets, but it does come at a cost in the shape of deceptively small objects that come in at hundreds or even thousands of objects.

Speaking of which: You can scale objects now, which is really useful.

Also, they added the option (it's toggleable) to make you worry about power and water consumption, too, which is nice. And all the pool stuff comes with features like sunburns, weather that actually does stuff outside of making you bank from jacking up umbrella prices when it rains. (Heck, most recently they added snow – not just to paint the ground and as a placable prop, but as a weather effect that can cover exposed surfaces with snow, too!) All that, also toggleable.

The paths are a significant step up from Planet Coaster 1. It is actually downright trivial to create plazas, or cut out a very specific shape, or move the edge of the paths so that peeps stop clipping through doorframes, or walk through a pillar.

And while I am under no delusion that they likely would've tried to sell it as paid DLC if the community didn't complain loudly at the game's launch about the lack of scenery themes, I do like that they are gradually bringing them back as free updates.

My personal favorite feature (even if I didn't play around with it a lot yet) is that you can stick arbitrary scenery objects onto moving attractions though, so you can make coaster cars look however you wish, or (this idea is admittedly stolen from Nerdcubed's Planet Coaster 2 series) bury a slow-moving tracked ride underground and attach a blimp, ship or similiar to it. Then Advance Move the blimp/ship/etc. up to wherever you need them, put the buried ride into test mode, and presto – you got a decorative vehicle that moves convincingly all by itself without any (visible) track.

However, frankly... so far, Planet Coaster 2 doesn't really feel like a sequel to Planet Coaster 1, and more like an alternative version of the same game, but still in Early Access – and if Planet Coaster 2 was still in Early Access, I could excuse many of its quirks... except, it had its full release a year ago.

Well, it is still in active development, going by the free update and paid DLC that just released, so hopefully those things will have been ironed out through updates by the time the game celebrates its second anniversary.

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~ Sparky

If you have constructive feedback, I can be reached on Kind.Social.