In our Park Beyond review content, we take a look at the general dynamics of the game in which we set up our own amusement park.
Park Beyond review: When I first saw the game, I thought of Roller Coaster Tycoon games that I used to play for hours. I would spend hours at my old computer preparing my park, arranging the trains, and then rejoicing at the perfectly functioning park. Of course, it was short-lived, a problem was inevitable after all. Afterwards, I enjoyed playing various Tycoon games and games with park themes such as Planet Coaster and games involving different inhabitants such as Prison Architect.
Park Beyond review / PC
In our Park Beyond review, we take a look at a game where you can design things where you can express your creativity rather than a simple park building game. So how good is it, what are the differences compared to other games, can we say that it is an unmissable game for those who love the genre? Let’s examine it.
Let Your Creativity Speak on the Fire Escape
Park Beyond has a very interesting starting Campaign mode. You are building a Roller Coaster that starts from the fire escape of your apartment. Meanwhile, you learn how to play the game in a fun way with the help of the NPC characters involved in the event. Then you take control of different parks in various places and try to complete the tasks by applying what you just learned. Your goal is clear, to ensure that the park you control is profitable.
The story mode is not bad overall, you get a good idea of how you should play the game and it doesn’t take too long. It’s nice that it’s not too long, some restrictions in the story mode take away your chance to do everything you want. Of course, with a limited budget, you can’t make flying and escaped vehicles according to your head. That’s why you want to quickly handle the story mode and switch to the sandbox mode. The real fun is already there.
Sadbox Mode and Flying Coasters
When you enter the sandbox mode of the game, you step into a world where you are limited only by your money and imagination. Here you will create your own park and this part is not much different from other games. You arrange the park, determine where to put the toys, determine the locations of facilities such as markets and toilets, and play around with the prices.
There are some statistics that you need to follow while managing the park, according to them you are successful or you find the bottom. Apart from “cleanliness”, which is the cleanliness of the park, and “fun”, which determines the overall entertainment rate of the park, there is “amazement” from visitors who ride “amazing” activities and “profit” that shows how much money you have left in your pocket at the end of the day.
The cleaner and more fun your park is, the more visitors it will attract and add new things to, the more visitors get to ride new events, gaining “amazement”, and allowing you to do more extraordinary things. If you do these successfully, you will get a profit. I recommend you to play the story mode to fully master how they work. They’re not hard to follow, but it can take time to get used to balancing them all.
If you have played any of the Tycoon type games before, we have a game that you can get used to quickly. Especially if this game is a game like Planet Coaster or RollerCoaster Tycoon, you will quickly warm up to both park management and creating events. But one difference in this game is that you can go beyond the limit of realism (Beyond, you know…)! This is where the feature we call “Impossification” comes into play.
“What is Impossification?” You may be thinking, of course, let’s explain. You know, we just talked about the “Amazement” feature and we said that you can do more extraordinary things in this way. Here we use those points as a currency. Each event has its own extraordinary additional features, for example, instead of a standard Ferris wheel, you can make a Ferris wheel that also rotates on its own axis. Or, instead of trains moving using rails in Roller Coaster (I’m not sure if we call them high-speed trains) events, you can use vehicles that are thrown across a ball.
Among the simple activities I have mentioned, you need to determine what you want to do and prepare accordingly. After that, it’s up to the visitors, either they provide the necessary “amazement” points for you to like the event and produce better things, or you will have to demolish it and make a new event.
Park Sinking Problems
What I’ve told so far actually creates the impression that the game is pretty good, right? Actually, the game is really nice, but some minor and simple problems are getting on our nerves. Moreover, some of them are technical problems that will cause the game to crash, while the other part affects the most important and remarkable points of the game.
The most common problem I ran into was customers not getting on the ride you set up, especially in the story sections. You are preparing a new vehicle, everything is ok, but the customers don’t even see it, stop getting on it. Actually, it’s a problem that can be solved by saving and restoring the game, but if I’m not following closely, I might miss a lot of customers. Not only the customers, but sometimes the mechanics don’t see it, and if a vehicle breaks down, you wait at the beginning of the game saying “maybe that mechanic will see it”.
The game-specific “Impossification” feature should be the side that distinguishes it from other members of the genre, but the economy of the game stumbles a bit here. I’m building an extraordinary tool, it’s going to be a car that everyone dreams of, but naturally the entrance fee goes up. So, do you think customers say “It’s worth the experience” and ride it? Of course, they turn to cheaper vehicles.
If you reduce the price, it does not cover the cost, if you remove other vehicles, it does not. You are building your dream park, but what do we do when the customers are upset? They need to make an arrangement about customer diversity. Besides, the impossification feature does not give us endless options, it allows us to develop among the determined “extraordinary” features. Let me set up a flat park then?
The detail part of the game is also poor. For example, we can use the “impossification” feature on the employees in the park, but apart from that, there is no feature other than firing the employees or changing their salaries. Or there are lots of different landscaping items but not enough themed. Moreover, most of them have no effect on the park, they are added purely cosmetically.
Park Beyond, which I play on PC, requires a minimum Intel® Core™ i7-3770 / AMD Ryzen™ 5 1400 processor and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 2GB / AMD Radeon HD 7870 2GB graphics card to run. Recommended system requirements are Intel® Core™ i7-7700K / AMD Ryzen™ 5 3600 processor with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4GB / AMD Radeon R9 290X 4GB.
I played with a PC above the recommended system and overall I got a performance that I can say is “not bad”. It would be nice if he didn’t crash and blow up my save files. The producers, who fixed some bugs with various updates after their release, may have spoiled our recording files in the meantime, but let’s get it. As long as the game is fixed, we can play from the beginning.
Park Beyond offers both keyboard-mouse and controller support. Controller support sounded not bad, but when it comes to the “build” part, the annoying side comes up. Due to the strange movements of the camera, various bugs (some of them were fixed with updates) and parts overlapping each other during construction, the building part was not very comfortable even with the help of keyboard-mouse, I couldn’t be patient with the controller. Sometimes, when I wanted to edit a small part, I deleted all the things I did.
Conclusion
Park Beyond was a game that left the impression on me that “it found a nice part that could distinguish itself from other games of the genre, but couldn’t use it enough”. They wanted to make a Tycoon game, but they said it shouldn’t be too similar to the others, and after installing the system, they said “this is very different, let’s not go into details”, as if they brought standard Tycoon features by shearing some of them. But they also brought less.
With a price tag of 750 TL on Steam offered for sale Park Beyond is neither a very bad game nor is it able to stand out by bringing great innovations to the genre. If you are interested in the genre, if you have played Planet Coaster and Roller Coaster Tycoon, you can take a look at this game. But considering that its competitors are more advantageous in terms of price (not only the local price), I recommend that you use your priority choice in favor of them and wait for this game to go on sale.