Park Beyond Review – A Fun Experience But Needs More Polish

Park Beyond is very reminiscent to the times I’ve spent playing similar titles such as Roller Coaster Tycoon or Planet Coaster. While the game feels like a more simplified version of the other titles where it doesn’t have much of an overwhelming mechanic or menu for players to learn, it still manages to retain the complexity of how to manage a theme park.

Building From the Ground Up

Players can build roller coasters in different ways, where it could go through tunnels or even be shot through a ravine with a giant cannon, there’s not much of what you can’t do as long as you’re able to pass the test drive.

When talking about building the theme park from scratch, the process is pretty simple and fun most of the time. You start by building a few shops and paths in your theme park, then you can start placing those flat rides like the classic pirate ships or shining pendulum.

There are various sizes of flat rides and each of them will cost a different price to build. Once you place down the flat rides, you’ll have to set an entrance to let the visitor get on it an an exit to let the visitors out from it. You can build anything before you start to run the whole theme part because there’s a pause button for you to everything.

Elements in the Park

There’s 4 important aspects that you’ll want to take note of when running your theme park: Profit, Fun, Amazement and Cleanliness. Breaking down those aspects, Profit is pretty self-explanatory where players have to keep earning money, if players aren’t getting a positive income for 3 months it’ll result in a gameover.

The Fun and Cleanliness combined to create the park appeal from visitors. There’s also a level system in the game and the park appeal essentially acts as an experience point for players. For each level the player has to reach a certain amount of park appeal to level up, which in return unlocks new items such as flat rides or shops.

Next comes to the Amazement where the only purpose for it in the current game is to impossify and players can get it by letting visitors go on rides. Different rides with separate in different categories like target visitor group or profit rates.

As with other theme park management games, Park Beyond is fairly similar where once you build up the basics, you can start running the theme park. Visitors will come in and spend money on shops, rides, and you’ll have to hire staff to keep the theme park running such as janitors, ride mechanics, paramedics, and even entertainers. However, you’re not able to instruct these staff members individually, which feels a bit odd since I’m used to micro-managing in other park sims.

Management 101

There’s also upkeep for pretty much everything in the park. Through my observations, most of your income will come from the food and drink stores and certain flat rides. Most of the time your roller coaster rides will consume most of your profits depending on how you build it. This confuses me the most because it discourages players to build more rides and roller coasters considering there’s not much benefits to building them.

As for the roller coasters, there isn’t much of limit on how you can build them as long as you can pass the test drive simulation. You can concoct up a really crazy roller coaster with 4 or 5 360 spins on it. However, you’ll need to keep in mind of the upkeep fees, which will definitely put a strain to your funds.

There’s a visitor feedback system in which visitors can leave their feedback on everything they visited. Visitors will visit the shops they “like” before the shop they “love”. If a shop or a ride gets too much negative feedback, it might end up losing money, so your only choice is to demolish and rebuild it immediately.

Noticeable Bugs

Throughout my time playing Park Beyond, I’ve encountered two major bugs which could potentially ruin your experience with the game. The first of which was a camera bug where pressing both the W key and Scroll Wheel together, you’ll lose control of the camera where it’ll keep going forward or backward, sometimes even stopping all together and the only fix for it would be going back to the menu and start the game again. With how often you need to change angles while creating a roller coaster, it can be frustrating to lose your progress just because of that bug.

The other bug revolves around the behaviour of the visitors on rides. Sometimes, the visitors would get stuck at the entrance or exit and you won’t notice until you find out that you’re losing money. Every ride needs an upkeep fee to keep them running, so if the visitors can’t get in or get out, it means that you keep spending money without getting anything back.

It doesn’t happen often when you don’t have that many visitors, but you’ll start to feel it when you level up and the visitor threshold increases. This essentially causes you to restart your rides and cease everything you’re doing.

Verdict

Park Beyond was a fun and interesting experience in the beginning, where you can build whatever you want or like. Roller coaster creation is simple enough where you just have to build it and pass the simulation test. Not to mention the demolish function saved me so much time with just how easy it was to use. When it comes to being a theme park management game, the tools provided are pretty simple and easy to use, where you can just open up the management menu to look up anything you want to manage.

The upkeep mechanic is good on paper but executed poorly as players would get discouraged from how high the upkeep fees are needed to run a flat ride and roller coasters. Not to mention that the upkeep fees can get more expensive after you impossify rides and only get a temporary boost from it.

Lastly, the bugs I previously mentioned just gets worse the longer you play the game, and it forces you to constantly restart the rides or lose the game, which to me breaks up the immersion of a theme park simulation game.

Park Beyond was reviewed on PC via Steam. Game code was provided by the Publishers.

Park Beyond

Publisher: Bandai Namco Entertainment

Release Date: 2023-06-16

PlayStation 5, Steam, Xbox Series X|S

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