Park Beyond

Review

REVIEW OF EARLY PREVIEW RELEASE SO THINGS MAY CHANGE UPON FULL RELEASE OF THE GAME

After being rudely a waken by your alarm clock, you crawl out your pit for another day. You craft a paper plane out of one of your roller coaster designs and throw it out the window. It hits a Blaize Ultra that’s flying about; well, she was until the paper plane caused her to crash. She picks up your paper plane and notices your designs and likes what she sees. She is supposed to be testing roller coaster modules for Phil Bailey of Cloudstormer.

Cloudstormer is a great company, however it has been struggling of late in its theme parks, but Blaize really thinks that between you, your designs and the things that Phil has thought up, you’ll be able to turn the company around and return it to its glory days.

In the campaign you begin with the first mission, Ambitious Beginnings.  There are five difficulty levels to choose from: Dreamer (for those who want to focus on the creativity of the game without too many management challenges), Visioneer (those wishing for a good balance of creativity and management without dealing with too much micromanagement), Manager (recommended for those wanting to put emphasis on management gameplay while leaving plenty of room to be creative in your theme parks), Top Executive (for those wanting to deep dive into micromanagement), and finally Tycoon (for those players who wish to face the game’s ultimate challenge).

Ambitious Beginnings will take you over the basics of building a roller coaster. You will have to follow your paper plane, which lands at various points around town. Each time the construction of your roller coaster reaches the paper plane, the plane will move on until you reach your goal. Your roller coaster begins from your bedroom window.  Starting from an orange box, you will place tracks down in sections.

These track sections can be raised, lowered and banked, allowing you to be as creative as you like, although you must make sure that your roller coaster will take folks around the track in their roller coaster cars without stopping or crashing to the finish line. There are normal tracks and then there are tracks like a Chain Lift, which pull the cars up a section of track when they don’t have enough speed to reach the top of an incline. You also have tracks which can reduce the speed of your cars, bringing them to a halt and then using another type of track to propel them at great speeds.

You also have a wide range of premade tracks, such as loop the loop, corkscrew and a whole lot of others that you can connect and combine into your dream roller coaster. On top of that you also have Modules, which are a whole new ball game. There will be some already available, but you will have to unlock more as you progress. Modules can do some crazy things! For example, the Ramp Module allows your cars to jump in midair, leaving one track and landing safely as it joins another if your cars have enough speed to make the jump. The speed of the jump is indicated as you lay the ramp module down; the bigger the jump the more speed is required to land safely.

There are other modules, such as the Three-Way Fork, Cannon, Car Lift, Filter and Spring and more. All of which can give your roller coaster the excitement that people demand in a busy theme park. Unhappy folks means empty parks and empty parks means you’re not earning any money. And while Phil doesn’t care about the money spent on creating fabulous rides, Izzy certainly does, and she wants to keep the rest of the board members happy by turning a profit.

After completing the Ambitious Beginnings, you’ll head off to the next campaign mission. Here you’ll take what you learnt from the first mission and add it to a theme park that you will create. Each mission will have a set of objectives. There are also side objectives that you can complete to give you a better overall rating.

When you start a new mission, you’ll have a meeting with Izzy, Phil and others to discuss what your vision is for the new park. You will be asked some questions and be allowed to respond with various answers. Will this park be created for adults and teenagers in mind, or will it be a family park? These are all things that will need to be taken into consideration when designing your park. Although just because one group of people doesn’t like a certain ride doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have that ride; there are many different visitors.

Currently I’ve only been able to play three campaign missions as this is an Early Preview Release prior to the upcoming Closed Beta Test from the May 9^th - May 19^th, 2023. Because of this I’m unable to comment on any other campaigns, but for missions two and three you start with a blank sheet with a small path that serves as your entrance, and the rest is up to you. Not only will you have to build rides, but you must also have paths that connect all the rides, paths for queues, and paths to exit the rides, all of which can be customised to your liking.  There are different types of paths for queues and exits, and different ones again for laying around your park. You can also place a variety of railings along your paths; I haven’t seen any folks fall off a high path, but if they can then I’m sure it wouldn’t be good news for attracting people to your park.

There are details about each ride to help you choose: Cost, Upkeep, Visitor Preference, Ratings, Amount in Park, Novelty. Visitor Preference is divided into three categories - Adults, Families and Teens. Ratings are also divided into three categories - Fun, Profitability, and Amazement.

One thing that will make your park stand out from the rest is that you can impossify your rides, your stands and your workers. This takes the boring normal and gives it extra pizzazz and a definite wow factor. Impossifying your rides will take them from the standard and transform them into something out of this world, revamping their designs into new and wonderful creations. Turn boring food, drink and souvenir shops into stunning attractions; workers are transformed, entertainers wear wacky costumes, and cleaners get fancy incinerators to keep the park clean.

To impossify anything you will require lots of amazement, so you must keep your paying customers happy otherwise not only will you lose them, but you will never be able to create anything other than the run of the mill theme park. The sky’s the limit when you start impossifying everything!

You can do quite a bit of micromanaging, such as setting the prices for park entry, rides, and even mineral water. You can get a better look at how your park and its visitors are doing by checking out the Heat Map. The Heat Map shows you what is making a profit and what is not. It can also tell you how happy or not your visitors are, which is indicated by different colours. You can click on individual groups, rides, shops etcetera from the main game screen and get personalised details for that group.

Food and drinks stalls, vending machines, ATM’s, toilets and souvenir shops must be built to keep your customers happy and spending their hard-earned pennies inside your park. You must also have people working at the park, cleaners for rubbish that soon builds up, and mechanics to keep the rides in tip top shape, otherwise they’ll break or catch on fire which isn’t going to get you good ratings and will soon empty a park. Entertainers amuse the customers as they wander around with big smiles on their boat race, keeping them as happy as Larry. Paramedics will help the sick and those who have eaten and drunk too much and then decided to go on a fun but nauseating ride.

Along with the campaign there is also a Sandbox mode with twenty-eight maps for you to choose from. You’ll be able to choose the settings for each map and customise your experience. The settings on offer are Difficulty, Upkeep, Starting Funds, Land Extensions, Research, Ride & Facility Decline and Goals. The maps consist of different regions, such as Asia, Alpine and the Mediterranean along with terrains including valleys, plains, deserts and mountains.

I’ve enjoyed playing Park Beyond so far, playing as an Early Preview Release. This is a version of the game released before the planned Closed Beta which is happening between May 9^th and 19^th 2023. You can register on the following link https://bnent.eu/BetaPB to be part of it! As this is an early version of the game, I have had some problems, which I expected. For the most part it’s been great, but I have had some trouble with the game crashing.

When it crashed, I sent the crash reports back to the developers through their crash reporter when the game closed down. A lot of the crashes came from me trying to restart my game from where I had crashed previously. The game would load my last save no problem, but within a minute or two it would crash again, and no matter how many times I tried to continue where I left off it just wouldn’t play ball. This is the type of thing I fully expected with an early version of the game, and I imagine it will be sorted out in the future.

A couple of times I had some trouble laying down paths from rides, more so when playing the Sandbox mode. The path would split like it was on two different heights, no matter how I raised or lowered the path I struggled to lay a path down cleanly. This never happened in the Campaign mode, so not sure what was going on.

The only other problem I had was when placing one of the drinks stands down. The roof of the stand would be level with the ground and the rest of the stand underground. I was able to raise the stand so it was standing the way it was supposed to, but this placed it in midair. Visitors to walk along the path and buy their drinks as normal, it was just in midair.

I will keep playing the game and I hope that these few problems will be sorted out in the future, as I think the game is great and look forward to seeing what happens when it is fully released on June 15^th, 2023.

Preview written by Piston Smashed™ for Zeepond.com

Park Beyond Steam Store page