Hello everyone and welcome to a new video… er, no. Hello everybody and welcome to another Timely Review. You may remember that a year and a half ago, I made a Timely Review of the original RollerCoaster Tycoon, but there’s so much to talk about. After the first game was a smashing success, it saw the release of two expansion packs, and then those expansion packs were also smashing successes. With this in mind, a sequel to the legendary first game was inevitable. Three years after the first game came out, RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 was released in October of 2002, which also had two of its own expansion packs and similarly was a huge hit. 

Just like the first game, RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 was coded entirely by one person, Chris Sawyer, who used Assembly to make all of his games of this era, and somehow managed to make it handle entire functioning theme parks with thousands of guest AIs active at the same time and getting it to run on old computers from over 20 years ago. If you knew exactly how much is going on in the background as you’re playing the game, you’d be convinced that Chris Sawyer is the single smartest human on the planet. I’m already sure that he is.

While the two halves have justifiably cemented Chris Sawyer’s status as a legend in the video game industry, what tends to go underappreciated is the work of Simon Foster and Allister Brimble. Foster created the game’s sprite work and Brimble created its music, which are all part of why the first two games of the series are as notable as they are. The games are a three-person job, and those three managed to create something truly remarkable. But all of this praise about how fantastic the game is doesn’t mean much if I don’t explain why it’s so great, so let’s begin.

It's Back and It's Better

RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 plays almost exactly like the first game, with some minor differences. This actually did cause the game to receive some criticism back when it first launched, but it also makes the game very easy to pick up and play, since people who are familiar with the first game will already know pretty much exactly how to play. Don’t try to fix what isn’t broken, I guess? Changes from the first game in terms of gameplay are mostly some small quality of life changes such as improved pathfinding, being able to place rides underground or overground much easier, and no longer needing to disable the “Mow Grass” feature on all handymen you hire.


Now you too can build giant factory buildings in your theme park!

One of the few major changes in the second game is the scenery builder and the scenery in general. In the first game, you were mostly limited to planting trees, fences, and some themed items on ground level. Here in the sequel, you have the ability to construct scenery at any height you want, and the monumental increase of items allows you to create some large and very elaborate structures. Many scenarios, especially in the two expansion packs, make very liberal use of the added scenery tools to add a lot of life to the park that you wouldn’t have been able to in the first game.

Predictably, the actual objective of the game is exactly as it was in the first game. You build and manage a theme park until you complete the objective, and you can optionally continue to keep playing even after you win. RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 doesn’t offer much in terms of entirely new rides, but it does add a lot of new vehicles and reskins for rides from the first game, meaning that you have even more ways to add some visual variety to your park. The actual construction of the rides haven’t changed much, although the ability for roller coasters to now have turns that are banked and sloped at the same time is a HUGE improvement over the first game for how small of a change it looks.

Ultimately, everything you could do in the first game is something you can do here too. You can build rides basically anywhere you want, alter the landscape, build some pools, send your guests to an explosive death by constructing a shuttle loop that goes way too fast. If you could do it in that game, it’s something you can do here too. The only exception to this is that in this game, you can’t charge for both the rides and the park entrance at the same time, like you could in the base game and Corkscrew Follies scenarios from RCT1.

And... Worse?

But while there are a lot of ways that the second game is better, there’s also at least one way in which it's worse than the first game, and that would be in its scenario design.


Remember the painstakingly perfectly-crafted landscapes from RCT1?

In RCT1, every park from the base game and both of its expansions had such elegantly crafted landscapes that looks like every tile was deliberately laid out and planned ahead of time, and it resulted in some beautiful looking parks and realistic land formations that were fun and interesting to build on. That has sadly taken a bit of a backseat in this game. To Chris’s credit, there are still a fair number of parks in the game that DO feel as beautifully designed as his RCT1 parks, but if you look at the screenshot of Alpine Adventures above, it’s very obvious that it was designed in about 5 minutes with the mountain-sculpting tool from the Scenario Editor (we’ll discuss what that is in a little bit). I didn't properly realize this until I fully completed RCT2 for the first time, but the general park design in this game is weaker than the first game, although it does still have its own share of epic parks.

This is also reflective in the way the game’s difficulty curve is handled. The first game had an immaculate difficulty curve where the first five scenarios that were unlocked started with the short and sweet Forest Frontiers and then ended with Evergreen Gardens, which was a large park with a long play time, but a small guest goal for the amount of time you were given, so it was still a balanced challenge for beginner players to apply everything they learned from the previous four parks to see how they can run a big park. The two expansion packs of the first game don’t have smooth difficulty curves like the base game did, but by the time you reached the parks in the expansions, it was assumed that you had some experience (or had perhaps even fully beaten) the base game.

This contrasts the difficulty curve in the second game, which is less so a curve and more or a mountain range (or a roller coaster, if you will). The first scenario in the game is Crazy Castle, which asks for 1500 Guests in four years, which is not hugely difficult, but it’s quite insane compared to how Forest Frontiers asks for 250 Guests in one year. Because the scenarios are arranged alphabetically (instead of by difficulty as they were in RCT1), this means that you play a lot of harder scenarios before easier ones unnaturally. Amity Airfield is one of the most infamous and difficult scenarios in both of the games, and because of its name, it is listed as the FOURTH park in the game as it is also placed in the Amateur section instead of the Expert one. For a new player who just completed the Beginner section, Amity Airfield is an absolute nightmare. In spite of the fact that all the scenarios are unlocked from the beginning (contrasting the first game which gave you 5 parks at a time), the game is less beginner-friendly than the first game because it feels like it was designed with you to have already beaten the first game.


The Australian government banned walking on Uluru in 2019 due to its historical significance to Aboriginal Australians. Somehow, I don't think building a theme part on it would be appreciated.

The expansion packs are also of generally lesser quality than the expansion packs from the first game. The new scenery items it provides for decorating is fantastic, but the scenarios it comes with are often of questionable quality in spite of their visual appeal. Unlike the expansions from the first game, the expansions of the second game were not designed by Chris Sawyer himself, but were instead outsourced to Frontier Development, who previously developed the Xbox port of the first game and would later go on to develop RollerCoaster Tycoon 3. This means that there’s a very notable dissonance between the designs of the expansion pack scenarios and the scenarios from the entirety of the first game and the base release of the second game.

One huge plus with both of the expansion packs though is the HUGE increase in theming possibilities when building your own park, which brings me to my next point...

But Still Better!

But while some of the scenario designs in the second game are a bit lackluster compared to the first game, there’s one feature that single-handedly makes up for all of this: The Scenario Editor.


Your head is brimming with possibilities, isn't it? Yes, you CAN use this tool to build it.

The scenario editor allows you to create your scenarios with your own rules and customize practically every aspect. You didn’t like the way those medieval parks from the expansions looked? Make your own! You want to just mess around with unlimited money to build whatever you want? The scenario editor has got you covered. This even allows you to take saved games and maps that come with the game and expansion packs and make your own scenarios with them. The game doesn’t have an official sandbox mode, but the scenario editor allows you to emulate it absolutely effortlessly. The land could be entirely flat and lifeless for all I care and the feeling of building epic rides that people love would still be there, and you could always decorate it yourself.

As you can predict, it’s a lot of fun to have unlimited money to build and design absolutely anything you want with no way to fail the park, and this is one of the biggest selling points of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2. It allows you to do absolutely anything you want to. It’s basically the first game but with even more freedom than that one had. It’s still just as satisfying to build huge, intricate roller coasters and giant theme parks that everyone loves. Even if the second game focuses more on fancy locations that are pretty to look at as opposed to well-crafted plots of land and ease of learning, building a park is still just as fun and rewarding as it is in the first two games. Since you can make your own scenarios with infinite money and nearly every ride, there’s almost no limit to what you can make. Some people have even made their own custom scenario packs with this tool.

And Even Better Than That!


If the world is still here in the year 3000, this is one thing that will definitely still exist.

In the 2020s, it would be an absolute crime to talk about RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 without also mentioning OpenRCT2. OpenRCT2 is an open-source remake of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 that improves on a lot of elements, fixes some bugs, adds some cheats and even some new items altogether. Allister Brimble, the composer for the themes of the first two games, even composed his own theme for the mod… which I honestly don’t like that much, but it’s still cool to see a person involved in the original game helping out on the project. RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 was already regarded was one of the best PC games of all time and had an active community before OpenRCT2 existed. With the mod, it’ll never die.

OpenRCT2 does require you to have RCT2 installed to use, as it links to its directory. You can also link it to an RCT1 or RCT Classic directory, which allows you to play the RCT1 scenarios with RCT2’s mechanics. It is possible to do that without OpenRCT2, but with OpenRCT2 is by far the easiest way to allow this. Any RCT2 scenarios you’ve completed will even keep its completion progress, although it sadly will not do the same thing for RCT1 scenarios when you connect OpenRCT2 to RCT1.

RCT2 launched with 24 scenarios, and both expansion packs bumped it up to 55. Combining this with all the scenarios from RCT1 gives a grand total of 141 scenarios. Unlike RCT1, all the scenarios are unlocked by default in RCT2, which is a double-edge sword. On one hand, this means that you’re free to try out anything you want at basically any time through any of the parks, but it also means that the sense of progression is absent, which might feel less satisfying. OpenRCT2 allows you to enable or disable the function to unlock scenarios, allowing you to play all the RCT1 scenarios right off the bat, or play the RCT2 scenarios like RCT1 where they needed to be unlocked first.

OpenRCT2 also features a lot of cheats, which allows you to make the game as easy or as difficult as you want, and allows you to create a lot of crazy contraptions like… a go-kart track that jumps over a pit of fire. If the second game without OpenRCT2 wasn’t already enough of a sandbox for you, this is a sandbox the size of the whole universe as we know it.


They signed up for it. They knew what they were getting into.

From kids getting the game in cereal boxes to it becoming a part of their life that lives on forever in OpenRCT2, RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 is a game with a legacy that will last until the end of time. As for whether or not the first game is better, I’d say the first game is better as far as what parks actually come with the game at base, whereas the second game is better for customization and creating anything you want. Not that this really matters that much because they’re both thought of as two of the best computer games ever made and in my opinion, you should buy both of them.

RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 can be bought on either Steam or GOG, both of which come with both expansion sets already installed. If you do decide to play the game without OpenRCT2, you might want to pick up the GoG version since the Steam version tends to be more prone to crashing. No matter which version you get though, you're going to be in for a treat that will stick around for hundreds of hours. The version you pick doesn’t really matter though if you plan on installing OpenRCT2 with it since it uses its own launcher.

You can download OpenRCT2 through its official website. If you want to play OpenRCT2, you will probably also want to link it to RCT1 to play the RCT1 scenarios in the game. To do this, you will need to have RCT1 installed too. Just like the second game, RCT1 can also be bought on either Steam or GOG.

RollerCoaster Tycoon is far from Chris Sawyer's only contribution to the video game world. Join me next time when I look his game before RCT, Transport Tycoon. Or rather, its open-source release of it.

My Other Chris Sawyer Game Reviews