YMMV / Planet Coaster

• Awesome Music: The Light In Us All, the main theme, is considered by many to be one of the best parts of the game.
  • The scenario "Goldmine Tower" has an orchestral remix called "The Wonderful Planet of Coaster", synchronized to an elaborate fireworks display. Try jumping into a park guest's first-person view while watching the display, and be amazed.
• Best Level Ever: The game has some really well-designed parks that are not only beautiful in their own right, but also allow for some creative coaster designs. In particular...
  • Pirate Cove has some fantastic Mediterranean architecture, and also two levels of terrain - a wooded area and an excavation - that lends itself to more complex coaster designs. There's even an incomplete coaster that lends itself to this.
  • Good Gully Miss Molly is situated in a canyon where players can build giant coasters between crevices and through tunnels. However, objective-wise, this also falls under That One Level due to the terrain restrictions and having to build a roller coaster that dips down immensely.
• Game-Breaker: Adding lots of extra content to food and drinks makes it possible to charge far higher prices than their standard rates. This, combined with proportional ticket pricing on rides based on their prestige rank, can net a bountiful sum.
  • Restaurants. If used properly, these can render a lot of concession stands utterly irrelevant. Instead of a building that one group can use at a time that needs a vendor to man it, these can house multiple people at once and require no extra staff, only needing a janitor to visit every so often. And not only can a restaurant's capacity be expanded further, but they can offer a decent selection of items from every other food and drink shop in the game. And if the right perk is picked, then the place will be near-constantly abuzz. They can be a serious money and space saver to a player.
  • The workshop or custom creation sharing feature can be this, as one can simply search for highly-rated rides either to make money or to complete objectives.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • At the end of the trailer, the Gulpee Rex mascot goes back to help the park guest back on his feet.
  • The trailer itself and its release was this for many; the announcement that a proper park-building sim was finally coming to the modern gaming scene after so long, accompanied by a joyous and upbeat trailer set to Lady A that showed a clear and unabashed love for the genre.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The path feature is often criticized as the most frustrating aspect of the game, as instead of placing grid-by-grid or pull as far as you can, you can only create short segmented "blobs" that, especially when dealing with curves, is frustrating, though you can optionally adjust the length and width.
  • Similarly, creating track rides, roller coasters in particular, is far more complex than it needs to be. Making basic banked curves can be very tedious, and it only gets more fatiguing from there.
    • Learn to deal with the complex track building scheme, however, and it is possible to duplicate real-world attractions almost perfectly. And it gives a much more freeform control over custom rides, even if it's damn near impossible to make buildings around them.
  • Queue scenery, which is a "quantity over quality" approach to the amount of scenery objects surrounding the queue line. No wonder there are "100 scenery points" objects in the Steam Workshop to mitigate the issue.
  • Staff management such as malleable wages and training can come off as a huge swerve to those complacent with the relatively static staff workers in Roller Coaster Tycoon.
  • Security features, which turn certain guests into pickpockets that the player must eject from the park with security guards and cameras. While they give the gameplay a small element of realism and provide a purpose to the security guards, they drive up the costs of running a park and add a source of guest unhappiness, both of which either make certain levels unnecessarily difficult or otherwise restrict the player's freedom to build and create.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: As a successor to RCT3, some challenges really ramp up the difficulty. Free Challenge mode on "Hardest" difficulty leaves you with $1000 (the standard carousel is $900) and ridiculously difficult guest attributes to satisfy. Also, not working on a direct grid means ride, path, and especially building construction are much harder.
• Spiritual Successor: To RCT3 by the same developer.
• That One Level: Chief Beef's scenarios take a huge difficulty spike compared to the previous career levels. For all of these levels, money is a big problem as loan options are limited and expenses are high. Going in order:
  • Chief Beef's Raceway has a few misleading hints as how to complete its objectives. There are a few incomplete parts of the track that tempt the player to attach them to expand the racetrack for one objective's quota. However, this tends to reduce the monetary efficiency of the ride, so it's best to save it for last.
  • Oak Island has a number of old rides that can rake in a decent amount of revenue. The bigger problem is the amount of stores that simply don't attract many guests that can't be removed, leading to unnecessary staff wages. The roller coaster criteria is also very specific and costly, one requiring ten inversions among high excitement ratings and massive length. It doesn't help that it's difficult to get guests to move to new rides placed far away from existing ones.
  • Downtown's wasted stores put Oak Island to shame. The more obvious dilemma comes from the litter and vandalism akin to Roller Coaster Tycoon's Ivory Towers. Cash is even more scarce than ever and security guard wage demands are high.