Planet Coaster 2 – build your own Thorpe Park (Frontier Developments)
Frontier Developments’ state-of-the-art theme park builder could take the genre to new heights, even on consoles.
Perhaps it’s their inbuilt feel-good factor – seeing virtual humans having virtual fun provides a surprisingly good buzz – but theme park simulators have carved out an unexpectedly popular niche in the video game world. There’s a surprising number of the games already available but there’s a special air of anticipation surrounding Frontier Developments’ Planet Coaster 2, since its 2016 predecessor is so beloved.
We managed to get over two hours’ hands-on play with it, with the game running on an Xbox Series X – although we played it being streamed to a PC. Given that it’s always much trickier to design intuitive gameplay interfaces for high-end sims like Planet Coaster 2, that operate via a gamepad rather than keyboard and mouse, it was interesting to see it being demoed on consoles.
After some initial confusion (we had been jumped into the third chapter of Planet Coaster 2’s story mode, so missed the tutorials) it became clear that Frontier has done an impressive job in making the game accessible on every format.
Does Planet Coaster 2 have a story campaign?
Our first chunk of gameplay took the form of a scenario entitled Double Trouble, which cast us as an employee of a company called Coaster Coast, owned by a character named Oswald Thompson, who was engaged in some rivalry with another theme park builder called Kenta Suzuki, who had deviously purchased some land in the same park as Coaster Coast. That mean we could only build certain attractions on his part of the land but could do whatever we wanted on ours.
Once we got down to it, there wasn’t much in evidence of storyline, beyond a number of objectives (such as to build two swimming pools) which we had to meet or exceed. Respect to Frontier for figuring out a way of shoehorning a story mode into Planet Coaster 2, though, since theme park simulators aren’t generally known for possessing anything by way of narrative.
Interface-wise, Planet Coaster 2 made heavy use of the controller’s bumper buttons, enabling you to scroll horizontally across all the different elements that constitute its vast array of attractions, buildings, facilities, and staff. They also give quick access to vital elements such as the path-building system and the erase function: a crucial tool (accessible via a bulldozer icon) which, we found, had been cleverly tuned for a gamepad, by allowing you to adjust its brush-width (wide lets you delete whole chunks of things you had erroneously built) and to apply filters so that, say, it would only delete pathways.
How do the gamepad console controls work in Planet Coaster 2?
Having built a flat ride (akin to something you’d find at a sophisticated fairground) in order to start bringing in customers, we started placing some swimming pools. Two gameplay elements immediately stood out: the importance of careful pathing (customers will only move through theme …read more
Source:: Metro
