Beyond the Park Review
need to know
what is it? A theme park sim in the style of classics like Roller Coaster Tycoon.
release date June 15, 2023
estimated payment $50/£40
developer fringe entertainment
publisher Bandai Namco
Comment time: Ryzen 9 5900X, RTX 4080, 64GB memory
steam deck not applicable
associate Official website
Park Beyond isn’t a very subtle game, both because it’s loud and bombastic, and because it doesn’t quite hide which other games it’s been influenced by. Sometimes, though, that’s okay—hundreds of games try to borrow the ride of Fortnite or Call of Duty, but not that many try to emulate 2000s management sims like Roller Coaster Tycoon.
As I’ve done in other sims over 20 years ago (omg, did SimCity 2000 really come out in 1993?), I initially decided to skip the campaign in Park Beyond and go straight to Sandbox mode. At this point, the game gently suggested that I should at least try the tutorial before starting. I relented, thankfully the tutorials are concise and relatively easy to follow. To its credit, after just five minutes of talking with Park Beyond, I feel more than ready to build my own theme park.
After a few hours of playing in sandbox mode, I came back and started the campaign mode properly. It didn’t take long for me to realize that most of what was covered in the tutorial was just further stretched and simplified for the event, and admittedly, some new information on the park’s management mechanics. While the campaign does feature fully voiced cutscenes and a (rather weak) attempt at story, it never feels like a long tutorial. I got tired of the way I was doing and kept stopping and jumping back into sandbox mode, even though it was only a few hours total.
Given the simplicity and focus of the actual tutorial, I recommend ignoring the campaign, which saves you the trouble of spending time with wax-like characters. They exude an unsettling, uncanny valley vibe as they experiment with humor and fail more than they succeed. It’s better to bypass them entirely and go straight to the heart of Beyond the Park: building gigantic, ridiculous roller coasters.
Creating your own elaborate rides is easily the most fun part of Park Beyond. After spending some time with the physics engine and the initially clunky controls, I found the tools for laying out the park and customizing the coaster to be intuitive and, importantly, unrestricted. You’re given a fair amount of freedom to create what you want, though it does require physical work in the end. It might take some testing and experimentation to get there, especially if you like more improbable designs like me, but Park Beyond really helps you understand what’s working and what’s not with clear visual indications. The node system lets you fix your rides by splitting and manipulating already placed track sections, and it ends up being pretty loose when it comes to letting you create rides that defy physics.
(Image source: Verge Entertainment)
Impossification is a cute little mechanic that lets you beautify your rides and structures by making them happy, making them grander and more fantastical.
There’s also quite a selection of shops, restaurants, scenery, and pre-built rides that you can use to augment your park, available in a variety of colors to match your park, and you can play with Impossible to upgrade. Impossification is a cute little mechanic that lets you beautify your rides and structures by making them happy, making them grander and more fantastical. Most notable are the rides, which undergo two levels of elaborate, yes, impossible changes, until they become the roller coasters of your wildest daydreams (or nightmares, depending on your personality), Bring a whole new experience to your customers. The disappearance of mechanized shops and employees isn’t as exciting and mostly just improves your profit margins, but at least it still makes for interesting visual changes, such as your entertainment team becoming Pac-Man ghosts.
Terrain manipulation options are also abundant, allowing you to smooth surfaces, create large expanses of water, and carve deep canyons with little effort. A host of impressive coaster add-ons also want you to take full advantage of your free reign over the terrain, letting you shoot passengers in lakes, underground tunnels, and even looping around and through man-made gaps in the environment. Combine this with the freeform shape of track building and the large toy box at your disposal, and no two parks you create will ever look the same. This is a very impressive set of tools.
park jump
(Image source: Verge Entertainment)
I tested Park Beyond on two different versions, considering the system requirements (i7-7820X, RTX 2060 SUPER, 16GB RAM), the weakest of the two versions (i7-7820X, RTX 2060 SUPER, 16GB RAM) Should be able to easily handle gaming at recommended settings (i7-7700K, GTX 970, 12GB RAM). Unfortunately, I did experience some pretty heavy load times, and noticeably slowed down when my parks started getting a little too big. The better hardware I tested the game on did run smoothly, but I’m sure most people wouldn’t run to the store and buy an RTX 4080 just to get Park Beyond running properly, especially given that the minimum specs aren’t given to indicate that it should be necessary of.
To make matters worse, no matter which version I play, I always get the same serious bug. I’m constantly crashing to the desktop with no error message, the music in missions and sandbox modes has a horrible habit of infinite stuttering, and there’s a lot of texture clipping when using the optional camera mode. Many quests also flatly refuse to progress even when their requirements are fulfilled — like placing rides in certain places, or selling a specific amount of an item in a shop — leaving me with no choice but to reset and touch again try your luck. Most annoyingly, sometimes the quick select option in the admin menu would permanently fail and always teleport me to the completely wrong store or worker, meaning I’d have to spend God knows how long manually switching from a A person is fished out of a sea of fish. Customers are just for a change of clothes.
LinkedIn Campus
(Image source: Verge Entertainment)
Whenever you’re not actively building coasters or rearranging layouts, there’s little interest to hold you back.
I’m also not entirely sure if some of the criteria that indicate the park’s success are flawed, or the result of opaque design decisions. The second time I tried creating a park in sandbox mode, I gave myself a huge starting budget and built a couple of expensive, ridiculously large custom coasters. I made sure to still follow the tutorial advice and build different flat rides, shops, toilets, staff rooms, and nicely decorated benches to keep the customers happy, but for some reason no one wants to ride the custom rides I built — — even though they are fake and seem to have good reviews. I tried gradually lowering the ride prices until I finally dropped them and offered them for free, but they were still listed as “abandoned” anyway. Other sandbox games I’ve tried haven’t had this problem – is it because I spend too much too fast, or is this just a rare bug? I don’t know – it’s frustrating after I’ve invested in my creation.
This is especially odd, because usually, making your park successful in Park Beyond is, if ever, so simple and easy. Even on the higher difficulty levels, the game only asks you to provide basic necessities to your customers, hire an appropriate number of staff, and occasionally use the “heatmap” feature to target any unsanitary or underdeveloped parts of the park. All of this is so easy it’s mind-numbing to go on. Whenever you’re not actively building coasters or rearranging layouts, there’s little interest to hold you back.
Park Beyond feels like a tough game to criticize–if you’ll allow me to use a cheesy metaphor, its main appeal is impressive, but its amenities are lacking. The system for building and customizing your park is certainly impressive–it’s one of the best such systems I’ve seen in a sim–but all the actual management is so underdeveloped that it feels overwhelmed. Added, and there are no strong activities to challenge you, and the experience is weak.
(Image source: Verge Entertainment)
If all you want to do is jump straight into sandbox mode, give yourself unlimited money, and build an incredibly large roller coaster, Park Beyond is worth buying… and possibly discounted after a few performance patches. However, if you’re looking for any depth beyond that, and of course if you’re the kind of person who’s more interested in business management than cycle physics, I don’t recommend it at all.
I’ve been trying to avoid comparing Park Beyond to its obvious inspiration, Roller Coaster Tycoon, but at some point you have to put them together. You’ll realize that Park Beyond has barely developed a core model, making its management system seem dated. The creativity and freedom to create rides and design parks is light-years beyond what was possible in early sims, but rough, flawed edges and a lack of depth make even Park Beyond’s strengths feel like style wins. over substance.
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