The game returns players to the world of highly customizable theme park attractions, with a new feature: the ability to create water park attractions such as pools and slides. Players can visit others' parks as guests, or collaborate on building them across platforms.
Planet Coaster 2 includes examples of the following:
- Bland-Name Product: Rides now feature an in-universe manufacturer name listed among a ride's description. These manufacturer names are blatant parodies of various Real Life ride makers (e.g. Dart Kinetics = Arrow Dynamics; Outamax = Intamin, etc.)
- Distaff Counterpart: King Coaster now has a female counterpart named Queen Splash, who is themed around water slides.
- Sequel Escalation: Both traditional theme parks and water parks are buildable this time around.
- Rides can now have scenery built directly on them now as opposed to just the surrounding area. Other new building characteristics include "twinning" (automatically placing repeating lines of scenery) and object scaling and mirroring.
- While both Planet Coaster and Planet Zoo have no shortage of collaborative parks done through Steam's workshop function, Planet Coaster 2 now has active cross-platforming and multiplayer, including the ability to visit other players' parks and even build one together in-system.
- A lot of real-life coasters are doing that weren't initially available in Planet Coaster are now featured in Planet Coaster 2, including triple-launch sequences (forward-backward-forward launching where the train picks up speed each time it goes through), alternating tracks (a train can go in forward and go out backwards or vice versa), and hydraulic drop sections (the train stops for an event before getting dropped like an elevator to another floor).
- Shout-Out: The new Bard entertainer looks similar to Cacofonix.