Park Beyond Preview: Building the Impossible

When starting the game, you’re being appointed the visionary architect of a declining amusement park company that’s no longer able to sustain its creator’s vision. Stuck between extravagant founder Phil and CFO Izzy, it’ll be up to you to make a breakthrough by creating the boldest, yet financially stable parks possible. Lots of characters, allies, and enemies, will cross your path and help you forge your own standing in the theme park industry. Of course, with big dreams comes big responsibilities, so you need to always be prepared to deal with any situation. 

Impossification

Impossification is the core theme and general concept of Park Beyond as a whole. The design system pretty much allows you to go wild and build the most over-the-top theme park you can think of. You can basically take one regular ride from real life and then overexaggerated its features to the point it deifies physics. For example, a normal Ferris wheel could be turned into a bigger and taller ride resembling a gear structure as you’d see in clockwork. It’s really is crazy stuff.

Park Beyond has also gone to greater lengths to be accessible to everyone. During our playtest, some people spend hours perfecting one ride while others spend one hour making a few smaller simpler rides.

Modular Coaster Building

To make things even crazier, Park Beyond also offers a Modular system that as far as I know only applicable to Roller Coasters. This system allows you to create, modify and upgrade your coasters with unique modules that are already being impossified. An example of this is the catapult that could launch a coaster train to different tracks or one that lets you fly around like riding a plane. Again, it really allows your creativity to shine. The way this system works is pretty much the same when you trying to make a roller coaster track around your park.

The ride creator tools are fairly easy to use, allowing you to grab and move parts around with ease. From the video demonstration, it feels really smooth to make a dollar coaster. You can even build on top of the previously built theme park facility so you’re not even limited by landscapes.

After finishing a course, you can even do a test drive in first-person mode or fixed camera perspective to see how well it is coming together. I’m really surprised how good the game looks even from a first-person viewpoint.

Story-Driven Campaign

Unlike most games from the genre, Park Beyond has a pretty serious story-driven campaign. Aside from managing the park, sometimes you need to do certain story missions with twists and turns. One of the main things that get you more involved with the story is the Pitch Meetings. 

It seems the develops didn’t want the player to just complete missions but also play a part in how the parks are run and developed. Before every mission, the game will put you in pitch meetings with different NPCs handling high positions in your park, like Mr. Phil and Izzy. In these meetings, you’ll be involved in a very serious discussion about what is the best strategy to manage your park going forward.

There are a lot of choices that you can pick and each of them uses different strategies altogether. This means it’s very important to pay attention and consider which one suits your park situation the most. If you want to make a theme park that is more catered to teenagers, then there’s a certain step that you need to consider first while also gauging the risk and rewards from that decision.  

Deep Management System

It’s not a simulation game without a good management system, and Park Beyond does certainly stand out. Being the creators of the Tropico series, Limbic Entertainment has included various different functions into the game management system to really give players plenty of freedom, while also keeping it clear for newcomers. When managing the park there’s a lot of things that you need to pay attention to such as visitors’ condition, whether they are in a good mood, what facilities they need, or even if they have money to spend and are having fun at your park. 

Once you’ve got facilities opened up, there’s gonna be a lot of things that follow later on. This includes managing staff, prices, or even being involved in loans and events. It creates a frantic but deep management system that always demands your focus.

There is also a system of the game called “Hooks”. This is a measurement that gauges visitors’ interest in certain rides around your park. Not every ride you make may attract visitors meaning you’ll have to put more effort into marketing and designing the ride to appeal to different audiences.

Speaking about managing or designing your park, they also revealed the first two visual theme packages in the game. These packages contain modules that you can use to create a distinct style for the whole theme park. You can easily create a candy-themed park or there’s also the wild west theme park. Of course, you can take it a step further and mix and match different visual package modules. It can help you bring more specific designs to life and allow for greater innovation. 

Closing Thoughts

For those looking for a good new theme park simulator to sync your teeth into, Park Beyond the high range of customization will have you covered. The gameplay is easy to understand will still be hard enough to still be a proper challenge.

For the creative types out there, this one that’s worth looking out for when it comes out in 2022.

Park Beyond will be released for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. Apparently, the graphics are so good that it doesn’t run well on PS4 and Xbox One.

Park Beyond was just one of many games to receive more coverage at Gamescom. Others include Tales of Luminaria and Pearl Abyss’s new game DokeV.

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