The ensh**tification of the game industry has unfortunately hit a previous bastion, Frontier, who have now succumbed to the corporate greed plaguing so many releases and sequels in the videogame industry.

The sequel is more of an expansion than a proper sequel in the sense that it offers a lot of new content rather than a true step forward or revamping of gameplay which is essentially the same as the original, you can now add water rides. It seems like for this sequel Frontier made advances on two fronts: For detail-heavy youtubers and console players, while completely sacrificing the more casual PC playerbase in its stead. The game feels very underbaked and incomplete, missing features previous games had introduced to them in updates and is overall just not a fun experience at the moment. Here are some examples:

- Custom gift shops and restaurants where people will sit and place orders are missing from things like Planet Zoo. It seems baffling to not include them, but not really if you're a console player.
-All the new food and drink stalls introduced to previous games over the years are missing.
- We've only got a handful of themes when the originals of both planet zoo and planet coaster had many many more.
-The flatrides section is dramatically lacking, especially when they paywalled basic rides from the previous game (Like a freaking carousel) behind a $20 DLC when it should've been included. Jfc.
-The menus are a much clunkier departure from the basically uniform style of Planet Zoo and Planet Coaster seemingly to cater to console players and are overall more frustrating to use. Why do I have to click "custom creation" every time I want to add some decorations to a building? It wasn't this difficult in either of the other frontier games.
-Path creation, billed as a major improvement, is still maddeningly difficult to use correctly. You have to go through multiple steps just to connect two basic sets of paths together. It's not very easy to keep a path on a grid or add pathing to an existing grid. You do get options that provide total control but it's still incredibly frustrating to use. This needed more time in the oven, it wasn't ready for primetime.
-The game is limited to 6000 guests for no reason frontier has been able to tell us about despite the previous games (Planet Zoo and Planet Coaster) Being able to support easily double that without causing framerate issues. This again, feels like a concession PC players have to live with in order to make the game shippable to consoles.

I will say the stuff I've seen really creative people put together on youtube is awesome, and people's creativity is boundless. I don't buy the argument though that frontier included "enough content" as the vast majority of players are not so creative or willing to put in the massive amount of time those people do in order to create their parks. That's why having multiple, easily insertable themes with simple decorations and buildings is so important to us.

Maybe in a year or two and on sale this game will be worth it. I just hate hate hate this trend of big game companies riding the coattails of earlier successes into mediocre sequels that needed more time in the oven. They need to stop it! I refunded this, maybe I'll pick it up sometime later.

The potential of this game is obvious and there are things I really enjoy here, but it is also a stealth Early Access game, and while releasing an unfinished game as finished would be considered incompetent if you were an indie developer, it feels intentional if you're a publicly traded company with 700+ staff, a 20+ year history of developing videogames and a fully staffed QA team that's going to tell the project managers stuff like, "Hey the pathing tools that are also used to build pools are frustrating to use, don't work well together and have a lot of bugs".

And the path tools are a fundamental game component as they're what guests use to move between all attractions as well as form the basis for pools. The advertised enhancements to them would hypothetically be awesome and add so much more realism and creativity to the game, but the path tools are busted:

- The cursor will wildly snap the cursor to many useless points in the environment unless you hold Ctrl.

- Paths often create random jagged geometry that cannot be smoothed, and the smoothing tool often creates SHARPER corners somehow.

- Some paths will sink into the terrain and create self-inflicted "Mesh Intersection" errors when you try and edit or connect them.

- Building paths using the line tool can have random differences in height that you'll only realise when you close a path loop and cannot be edited afterwards.

- The path line tool will decimate the geometry of a path randomly once you finish the loop, changing your shape and usually making it look uglier and more uneven.

- The edit mode provides only one, mostly useless way to finetune and edit the shape of a path after it's built.

- The jagged geometry paths create extend to pool floors, so if you ever build a pool that has differing depth levels the floor geometry will look spiky and triangulated.

- All these spiky and jagged geometry elements are things your guests will get stuck on in pools and paths, in part because they have little capability for avoiding obstacles.

- Invisible path issues will cause guests to continually stop and start moving, almost as if there's a spectral force that's stopping them from moving. They'll also get stuck and wave for help despite fully being on a path.

The first 30 minutes of this game were so serene and beautiful as I admired this beautiful campaign world with the gentle ambient music, but as soon as I "tried" to make my first pool that vibe was gone, I was just trying to wrestle with this while my friends laughed at what it was doing.

While I'm focusing on the paths here as they don't get mentioned enough, there's a lot of other valid criticisms - crashes, bad and broken guest AI, laggy and unresponsive UI pages, almost non-existent flume physics, launch day DLC that's mostly content from the old game, interfaces not being properly adapted to PC, and theres a bunch more smaller issues I'm forgetting.

I'm still enjoying this game enough to not refund it but I also can't recommend this game, and I'm not giving them a good review just because they've promised to fix only a few of the current issues, they need to fully fix this and more. Betas exist and from what I know the original Planet Coaster had a beta period, releasing it like this was an unforced error that only erodes trust and confidence.

Too many infuriating bugs and hard crashes makes this hard to enjoy at the moment. Game needed more QA testing before released.

Also way too many notifications and questionable game play changes from the first planet coaster...

Honestly PC1 had a much better release and felt way more fledged out.

WAIT UNTIL ALL MAJOR BUGS HAS BEEN PATCHED!!!