To be clear, I still play this game quite a bit because, well, it's all we've got. Also, if you're a "park artist," just ignore this review. You already know this is the game for you and I love watching your park videos on youtube. But for people who are interested in simulation or even waterparks, read on.
The issues...
Waterparks: The game was advertised on this feature. It doesn't work. Not even a little. Pools fill 10x beyond capacity, guests swim through dry land, and some even sprout wings and swim peacefully among the crowds. Frustrating bugs will have you tearing your hair out when no one will ride a new water slide and it's not clear why. Guests will think "I want to ride Bodyslide 1," the catch-pool will have guests in it, you'll redo the pathing 15 times, you'll check the g-forces, yet no one will ride it. Water slide physics are worse than RC3, lazy rivers simply don't work without unrealistic workarounds, and guests will also clump on paths around pools for no reason, getting "desperate" until you delete the paths (usually because vertices invisibly combined in a weird way). The community assumes these features are being ignored because metrics show players aren't interacting with these features. I wonder why??
Park Operations: The most requested feature since PC1 is realistic station operations. They still don't exist. If you're a nerd that watches coaster documentaries on youtube, you know that station ops is the most interesting thing about coaster design after the track itself. Yet in PC2, they are still incredibly underbaked, with one functional design, and you get to watch in frustration as every single guest must clear the exit gates until new riders load. The game is also missing opening and closing operations, the ability to control areas of the park, hold night events, and dynamically adjust queues. It does have a fast-pass system that is also basic and incomplete. Nearly two years in, we are finally getting ride queue times and a realistic ride photo system. They just don't care about this part of the game. Areas where they did try to expand park operations (staff schedules and utilities) are often bugged or very unfun. Like why am I managing staff break times in a game where there are no clear "days" or times.
Career Mode: If you like scenarios, the ones in PC2 suck mainly because they focused heavily on waterparks since that was their core advertising point. Even beyond that issue, the career mode maps are not memorable and often just frustrating (two different ridiculous "gorge" scenarios). I still remember probably half the RC2 scenarios, but I can't remember a single PC2 scenario landscape. Also, unlike Planet Zoo, PC2 provides no additional scenarios via DLC.
Sandbox Mode: It's 2026 and there's no terrain generation. I would even take a small pool of blank maps at this point, but no, all you get is flat, empty sandboxes. This is great if you're planning to painstakingly recreate your favorite Magic Mountain - not so great if you're more of a sim person and want to start playing the game and using the landscape for inspiration. Overall just frustrating because it wouldn't take that much effort to minimally cater to sim players, but Frontier is just not interested. Thankfully, the community has made some template maps on the workshop.
Anyways, if you're just interested in making a beautiful park, nothing beats PC2. The ability to create realistic coaster tracks is also incredible. But their lack of interest in improving the simulation really makes me sad. I'm not asking them to abandon their park artist fanbase, but it feels like they're leaving money on the table to not occasionally throw the tycoon crowd a bone given how many of us grew up on those games.
