Park Beyond Review: Less Gravity, More Crazy Rides

Once you hear this sound, you will never forget it. It is a kind of subtle clearing of the throat, like a small child scratching the throat. But in fact, the figurine just got off your painstakingly built roller coaster, grabbed his mouth and vomited. But it wasn’t a small, gentle shimmer. She papered over your pavement and is now on fire, still green and with potential for a second batch. For some, the legendary series RollerCoaster Tycoon was associated with the construction of attractions, for me it was these parodies, human stories, sometimes ending with the billion in question drowning in a nearby lake. The new Park Beyond is based on the game of a quarter of a century ago, but you will definitely not find painful humor in it.

• Platform: PC, PlayStation 5 (Remastered), Xbox Series X/S.
• Publication date: 16.06.2023
• Developer: Limbic Entertainment
• Publisher: Bandai Namco
• Genre: construction simulator
• Czech localization: No
• Multiplayer: No
• Data to download: 13 GB (PlayStation version)
• Game time: 25 hour campaign
• Price: 1599 CZK

The main thing here is to build the largest possible park that will attract as many visitors as possible. Short and simple. However, one thing sets Park Beyond apart from the competition: your job is to fill the park with rides that would not survive the gravity and security inspectors in the real world. Roller coasters launch carts with visitors into the air, flames swirl around a multi-colored pendulum, and stuck to a giant wheel … another giant wheel.

Since the RollerCoaster Tycoon series, several simulations of this type have been released, such as Planet Coaster or Parkitect. Park Beyond seems more accessible to me, but it has its pros and cons.

Fireworks, explosions, sound effects

In the campaign, which consists of eight missions, you play as a nameless builder, the master of building crazy rides. However, compared to RollerCoaster, you don’t just set simple goals like “Get 3,000 people in the park within two years.” You gradually open packages of smaller tasks for which you receive small rewards, usually in the form of a budget boost. Each mission has a central theme and some kind of final task, after which you complete the task.

The key to a healthy and well-functioning park is to balance the three categories, essentially the three types of resources your rides can produce. First, it is (unsurprisingly) about money. Secondly, you will find the Fun category, which will help you increase the popularity of the park – if you cross a given threshold, the limit on the number of visitors will increase, and you will also unlock a new package of attractions and shops. in the laboratory. The third resource is Astonishment, something that allows you to make the park even crazier.

The title plays with a creative concept that the developers have called Impossification. Your boss, annoying old Phil, who thinks the clothes are stuck somewhere in the Circus Umberto, wants the most original rides. Fireworks, explosions, sound effects. It is not enough for him to vomit on a roller coaster, Phil requires constant impact on the psyche of poor visitors. Thus, after collecting a certain amount of resources, each of your attractions can “cool down” if you reduce the realism even more. And, for example, the palace of Medusa, a carousel with several arms, suddenly becomes like a tentacle monster.

On top of all this, there is infectiously positive music written by Olivier Derivier. A man who boasts a soundtrack that is the exact opposite of the A Plague Tale series.

Watching the colorful rides and their new and new shapes is the most fun part of the whole game. Compared to its iconic predecessor, Park Beyond lacks the possibility of additional modifications and the aforementioned micromanagement. For example, cleaners march around the territory, but there is no way to allocate a place where they will take care of garbage cans and discarded garbage. You can’t even grab them by the shirt and manually move them to the area where someone pastured the barbecue, and then recklessly climbed into the palace of Medusa.

However, you can classically set prices for rides, barbecues or souvenirs. Damn checking how much people are willing to pay for toilets. Determine that only a poor man named Milos will clean up the vomit, but he will receive a royal salary for this. Clear color scaling is used to check what your visitors need or whether a new attraction is profitable.

When a carousel is better than a track

Each mission can be easily adjusted in advance during the meeting with Phil and other characters who will gradually complete your team. For example, you can set up your park for families with children and then build certain types of rides accordingly. Or that you will take the path of great risk, but also generous reward. The campaign is generally not overly difficult, and you don’t run into much difficulty until about the fifth mission, which takes place on small islands that you compete against the central villain Hemlock for. Suddenly you’re hit with a time limit and need to take out a loan to keep your islands from being blown away by the wind.

Out of nowhere, a huge looping roller coaster closes and you go broke.

But you’ve also encountered an unhealthy amount of bugs that will come to the fore in the fifth mission. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, Park Beyond on the PlayStation version has several technical issues that are not entirely related to the stability of the game (simplified: it does not crash), but affect the completion of some missions, for example. Sometimes your progress will reset, and sometimes your main attraction, a huge looping roller coaster, will suddenly and without warning shut down, leaving you bankrupt. In my observation, you always create problems when you try to change something that has already been built. Did you move the sidewalk a meter to accommodate the ice cream parlor next door? After half an hour, you find that people have stopped going to the network carousel in the neighborhood and are completely ridiculous complaining that it is impossible to get on it (they are lying).

Considering how beautiful the play environment looks and how inventive some of the rides are, it’s even more frustrating that the walkways sometimes don’t connect and break in weird ways. Or when you get on your own roller coaster that you want to ride in first person, the camera starts flashing.

Overall, the roller coaster in Park Beyond feels unbalanced. In RollerCoaster Tycoon, you built a complex monster, surrounded it with pyramids and palm trees, and the enthusiasm of the visitors knew no bounds. Trees or various decorations do not play a role here, they only look beautiful on a monitor or TV. In addition, the tracks are very expensive to operate, so I completed most of the campaign using the so-called flat rides, i.e. small attractions in a well-defined area. In addition, building your own tracks on a controller is not always easy – building on a flat surface is easy, but as soon as you want to draw a track, for example, through a hole in the rocks, the camera will annoy you.

Until now, there are no trains, boats or cable cars with which even complex cities could be created in RollerCoaster. But all this can theoretically increase over time, because the game has a lot of potential, despite some of its problems.

The result could be a Pac-Man themed mountain amusement park.

This is especially noticeable in the sandbox mode, which you can easily switch to right away without finishing the entire campaign. There are 27 maps waiting for you on which you can build a park without any restrictions – you can pre-set the difficulty or the size of the money package that you will receive right from the start. You’ll also find it easier to unlock different designs in the lab, and the result could be a Pac-Man themed mountain fair.

In this mode, you can drown a huge amount of time – without any major problems, but at the same time completely stress-free. After all, this is obviously the goal of Park Beyond. Offer an accessible building game where you can build a gravity defying track piece by piece.