Park Beyond Review – More Hill Climbs Than Thrills

The opening of Park Beyond is very silly, when you start introducing the roller coaster system, you build a roller coaster system that takes you off a fire escape, through a courtyard, over a building, and then through a cannon to the park entrance. With such geeky happy NPCs, they loop all the way back to cute places. This reminds me of being in pantomime – I just have to buy in, even for horrible villains who want to build (gasp) parking lots instead of theme parks.

Park Beyond sets itself apart from other theme park games with “concrete” mechanics, allowing rides (and, to a lesser extent, shops and employees) to “beyond” the usual, bigger and dumber than real life. So, in addition to loops and inversions, your ride mods include cannons, jumping ramps, bumper boat transformations and powerful springs. You’ll be given build goals to include these modules – or reach a certain height or speed – and these form the stats for setting the target audience and your rides when you’re building for the park rather than through your own community. There are puzzles here, and even more when you decide to cancel a ride, which unlocks an optional third, even more outrageous hook – such as driving at a top speed of 140km/h, or including three cannon fires .

The potential silliness of the roller coaster is fueled by Park Beyond’s control scheme, which focuses more on space than precision. Each new track block is placed by setting its end nodes so wide curves or steep slopes go up in one move, trying to fine tune anything specific requires trial and error without the support of finer tools. It’s very vibe-based, and for what Park Beyond has to offer, I like it most of the time. It’s great for slapping cannons on the ride, just not so good for trying to build a steep descent that doesn’t kill everyone on the bottom.

Conversely, flat rides require no engineering and are just visually pleasing, only to turn into more absurdly colorful health and safety nightmares when that’s not possible. The flat kraken backdrop turns into giant animatronic creatures that hunt riders from tanks, and an already dangerous slingshot ride turns into one that throws guests straight into the sky. It’s gorgeous and glamorous, giving every ride a strong theme.

Park Beyond’s presentation promises absurdity, and then the management element oddly kills it – and know I say that as someone who likes games that are just meant to drive the numbers up. After such a whimsical introduction, people slowly realized how the game’s system interfered with the promise of Park Beyond. It’s only when I get to the midpoint of a coaching session that I have enough control to see exactly what’s going on.

There aren’t too many variables to keep track of: profits, fun, surprises, and cleanliness. Your park must be profitable – three months of negative revenue means game over, even if you have no debt. The combination of fun (from visitors taking the fun rides they love) and cleanliness creates levels of attraction in your park that unlock new shops, rides and coaster modules. Amazement (from tourists taking amazing rides) is the currency used to make things impossible. These aren’t complicated, but the way the game interacts with them seems designed to prevent snowballing–which feels like an odd choice in a game this stupid.

The first clue was when I built an absolute coaster. This is the most amazing, fun, and most profitable ride in the park. I built it near the entrance where there are a lot of amenities nearby waiting for the excitement of my guests. they are not! They didn’t go on, didn’t even think about it.

Because there is a “Guest Reject” system, you get negative feedback on rides and shops, no one thinks about rides so I couldn’t realize what the problem was until I explored the sandbox mode, which inexplicably has more tutorials :: Guests visit their “favorite” rides before visiting their “favorite” rides. I can only assume this is to prevent what I do – players build popular coasters to build good stats early in the game – but I don’t understand why Park Beyond would want to suppress this behavior.

Then, instead of going to the performer I would like to be, the guests go to the nearest ride they just “liked”, which is further away – during their trip through the park, they get hungry or mouthy thirsty. It makes them unhappy and they leave. No matter how ubiquitous my food and drink store is, everyone leaves before even thinking about a big sale.

Then there is the impossibility. An interesting detail about the campaign missions is that you can choose optional objectives in them, so in one of them I choose as many rides as possible. This is where I discovered that the more you make, the more expensive each freeze becomes. An upgraded flat ride would give a tiny boost to the amazement—dozens a day—but the bar for being able to achieve another ride would rise by the thousands. Incredible shops can give you a tiny multiplier (1.05!) for fun or surprise, and it’s only temporary.

The upshot of this is that two of the most intriguing things about Park Beyond — building dynamic roller coasters, and crafting cartoon-upgraded level rides — have always been at odds with the rest of the game. Not snowballing is fine, but over time my parks usually get worse. Planning around guests’ odd priorities is a manageable setback for 3-4 rides, but as the park expands, it’s impossible to predict which previously popular rides will suddenly be overlooked. Two routes to the spiral of doom emerged: either the facilities near it were also deserted and I had hungry, dehydrated guests leaving the park early, or chance dictated that my most lucrative ride was now the land of a current man.

Park Beyond is more and more prone to destruction, because the game is full of bugs now. The already opaque management tool also miscommunicated with the rest of the game, telling me that Luxury Toilet 3 was losing money, but, when interacting with it, took me to Soda Shop 4. Paths — the bane of many park games — are finicky, so when visitors get stuck at an intersection, they become a horrible vortex of unmet needs and litter, and fail to direct staff there.

On more than one occasion, I’ve ended up in debt because a trip stopped processing guests, leaving a full queue, burning through maintenance costs, but not charging for tickets. Still, in keeping with ridiculous promises, the dumbest reason I ended up in a debt spiral was because of my toilet. Specifically, it resets the cost of every toilet in the park to zero whenever a new toilet is placed. In that particular park, apparently the toilet profit was the only thing keeping the lights on.

In a game where you can convert a space simulator into an actual rocket launcher and build totally non-lethal train-crash roller-coaster fun, I didn’t expect to talk about the toilet economy — twice. On the surface, Park Beyond is thrilled at its silliest, most exuberant elements, and so am I. But I ended up building the wonderful coaster with no one in Collapsing Park, because it inexplicably insists that you manage its economy very, very seriously – while blocking the tools you need, as well as its other fun.

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