There’s something very different about Prison Architect 2 compared to the original, and I’m not just talking about the jump from 2D to 3D. This game’s whole conception and creation has charted a very different path when compared to the “Early Access before Early Access was a thing” release and public development of the first game. Developed by Double Eleven and now under the stewardship of Paradox Interactive, its creation and planned future will be much more like a Crusader Kings or Cities: Skylines, with a base game to be followed by a steady chain of expansions and DLC.
Yet there’s suddenly some uncertainty floating around Prison Architect 2. Announced at the start of this year, it’s been delayed twice, and has now been revealed that Double Eleven has handed over continued development and support to Brazilian team Kokku. To the backdrop of Cities: Skylines 2’s troubles, that feels like cause for concern, but also for a little optimism – it’s not being forced out the door and the stated reason for the delays is to optimise the game further for lower-end hardware.
I’ve been able to sample the first handful of levels from the game’s career and… well, it’s Prison Architect, but translated into a full 3D game engine – the original had a kind of hacky 3D mode, but this has been designed from the ground up for it. Prison Architect 2 does a really good job of keeping the look and feel of the original game, thanks in large part to the character designs with their perfectly spherical heads, tubular bodies and Rayman hands. You can almost strip away that extra dimension by angling the camera to look straight down on your prison, which can help when laying out buildings, rooms and all the rest.
Something certainly very important for existing fans will be that Prison Architect 2 retains the same construction mechanics as the original. Walls still take up squares on the grid, so a 4×3 cell requires you to lay foundations with a 5×4 footprint, and you have to drag to create a four-sided room as opposed to building one wall at a time. Then, when creating rooms within a larger building still has placing walls and assigning a room’s role handled separately. A Two Point Hospital, for example, combines those two steps into one, which is more immediate, but doesn’t have the same ad hoc flexibility of Prison Architect.
While there is a dedicated tutorial, it almost feels redundant by the career’s opening, which gives you example prisons and hands out missions to complete fundamental tasks. For one prison it was to simply open up a new wing with another 10 prison cells, then it was to give staff a break room and laundry, to cut down on inmate violence through a mixture of building solitary cells and an infirmary, and then getting to the root of the matter by addressing inmate needs for socialising. Each level is wrapped up in a little bit of dialogue from the CEO, Warden, Guards or other characters, pitching the objective before letting you just get on with things, and then quipping as you complete them.
To be honest, you can barely call these scenarios, and as soon as you complete an objective you’re whipped straight back out to the career map – a city and the surrounding countryside – and can pick from the other missions currently available to you. However, what these early levels do provide is a great set of examples for how you might consider building your own prisons in the sandbox mode. One level had some really nice self-contained cell blocks with built in showers, common rooms and more, while others previewed the challenges of having a prison split across a road, or with no room to expand horizontally.
And so we come to what is probably the main appeal to the jump to 3D: multi-floor prisons. This just allows for so much more nuanced creativity in how you might want to lay out your prison, and it’s very straightforward to do. You can switch levels on the right side of the screen or with keyboard hotkeys, and then simply set out walls using the exact same construction tools as for the ground floor. Just make sure that you link floors with staircases, use vertical pipes and wiring to connect up the utilities, and you’re pretty much good to go. Heck, if you’re happy with a prison block layout, just select it, clone it, move up a level and drop it in place again. It’s (almost) exactly that easy!
Of course, it doesn’t have to be a building up there, and you could think of making gantries to overlook a yard, try to create a Panopticon prison, and plenty more besides.
That said, I wish we had more time within these spaces to explore and learn from what Double Eleven has created. Most management sims would let you carry on after completing a scenario’s main objectives, or have the first few levels cover all of the basics, but the first five levels here barely touch upon how to really dig in and manage your prison. It’s through my own curiosity that I sought to grasp how you unlock more room types, more approaches to incarceration or rehabilitation, and the various views and info panels to see how things are running. Those will certainly feature in more career missions to come, but splitting things apart this much is a slightly atypical way of presenting this to players.
I will also say that, while Paradox has said on multiple occasions that Prison Architect 2 has builds certified for all platforms, it does still feel like it needs some refinement before release. I faced crashes upon level exit, some flakiness with item placement and interaction, and just some oddities with the build tools. They’re intuitive on the whole, but I do wish that rooftop items were automatically elevated if you build an additional floor on top, for example.
Still, for fans of the original, I think there’s plenty reason to be optimistic and look forward to this game. Between now and September, new developer Kokku will be refining, polishing and and really honing this game, but from what we’ve seen so far, this is undeniably Prison Architect… in 3D.
