Here you can build the wackiest roller coasters in gaming history, without any millimeter fiddling. This was already a lot of fun in the preview version!
Coaster designers really don”t have it easy. Either the construction interface or the physics is grumbling – or both. Park Beyond is much more generous and accessible, without being too simple. Already in the tutorial you build an unusual track through the middle of a city full of skyscrapers, concrete tubes and street canyons. The basic elements are already there: for example, chain lifts that transport your cars to dizzying heights, and normal tracks that you shape with your mouse into curves, parabolas and abrupt valley sections.
Already building, a ghost test train keeps whizzing along your track so you can fix problems right away. This is also usually quick: A train flies out of the curve? Then we just increase its radius (boo!), build a brake piece in front of it (boo!) – or simply tilt the curve a bit (yay, more centrifugal forces!).
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The more boom the more screech
The first module is also included in the tutorial: a cannon. Such modules provide stomach-churning special effects. The cannon fires your entire train, including screaming passengers, over dozens of meters into a funnel, behind which it continues on rails.
In the campaign missions you unlock more and more such modules, for example forks, which distribute a train car by car on different routes, or the off-rail module, with which your wagons whiz through flat terrain or water without rails. Other parts bounce trains back with a powerful spring or accelerate them like manned projectiles.
At the latest before we open a ride for the public, a test ride is due – you know this from other games like Parkitect and Planet Coaster. However, you can define so-called hangers for your rides beforehand.
These are, for example, simple targets like “reach 4 G at least twice” or a track height of 100 meters. But there are also tricky targets such as “your train must be split in half on 80 percent of the track” or that a ride should last at least five minutes.
The more racy and wacky the train ride becomes for your visitors, the higher their enthusiasm – and that in turn unlocks upgrades. We were able to play two campaign missions, and already had a lot of options for cool rides.
The octopus on the mountain
This is also because you can always make full use of the terrain. For example, the third mission takes place on a plateau, with flat areas, but also rugged rock formations, several plateaus and canyons in between.
We immediately tried out whether we could place individual rides such as the splashy “Krasser Krake” on the mountains and plateaus – and yes, it works without any problems. We also lay the paths to the entrances and exits ourselves, and they can be darn high, steep and serpentine. After just a few elevated trails built, our park looked like an upturned bowl of spaghetti.
Later, terraforming will be added, but we haven”t been able to try that out yet. But we have already laid underground tracks, our train then hurtles through a tunnel back to the surface. However, in the preview version, some connections were not quite clean yet, so that, for example, straight pieces of track had a slight offset before sloping curves.
Young man wanted for ride
There”s a ride-along camera on all the rides, which is of course the most racy on the homemade roller coasters. When riding along, however, it bumps around in places where we didn”t build quite so cleanly. If you want a consistently smooth ride experience, you”ll have to fine-tune such neuralgic points.
Occasionally there were also clipping errors, for example when transitioning into the underground or close to rocks. Some passengers often didn”t sit in their seats, but offset on the wagon couplers. Hopefully such bugs will be fixed for the June 16 release.
Yes but … Ticket prices?
While auditioning (and in this preview), we did focus on the coaster building, because it”s simply the highlight of Park Beyond. Nevertheless, there”s also a lot of management involved.
You”ll have to place food stalls, beverage stands, restrooms, break rooms, benches and wastebaskets, and hire staff. But you don”t command cleaners, entertainers and co. individually, they do their job automatically where they are needed at the moment.
You are allowed to set the prices for tickets, burgers and sugar drinks exactly, though. This is worthwhile, for example, if a certain bubble tea is very popular and you want to exploit the hype financially.
Before the start of each mission, you determine which target group the park should attract in multiple-choice dialogues with your bosses, some of whom have a very overdubbed soundtrack: Teens, adults or families? Your choice then influences which attractions you should build.
Teenies want to permanently stuff sugar bombs inside and be thrown around as hard as possible [author”s note: very realistic, I have two of those myself]. Families with small children, on the other hand, prefer something like contemplatively rotating carousels and Ferris wheels.
You can always go a little bit more crass
You can upgrade individual rides, booths and your roller coasters with “Impossifications”. You unlock them with collected enthusiasm.
You can then, for example, pimp the “Krassen Kraken” to the “Kuriosen Kraken” – the ride then gets a higher value for fun and, well, nausea. The best thing to do is to hire a cleaner.
But above all, the octopus is bigger, more imposing and even funnier animated, because he hurls his victims in their submarine now really violently through the water, followed by several flips through the air and splashy re-sinking. While riding along via first-person camera, we got seasick after seconds.
Editorial conclusion
I had everything planned out exactly: Play until 11 and take last screenshots, and then write this preview on time. But then there was this narrow canyon – I couldn”t leave it empty after all! So I “quickly” extended my roller coaster, added two ramps, and let the cars fly through the gorge. It went really fast, because Park Beyond has a really good operation, even complex constructions are easily built, and the ghost cars immediately show where it crunches or even crashes.
But while I was at it, I could place a double looping behind the gorge, something the teens especially love. Oops, the next Impossification was already unlocked, I had to do it quickly …
Three hours and 4,321 visitors later I could finally tear myself away. Now I am curious about the finished game. Then we”ll see whether it motivates amusement park fans in the long run, because the park manager genre often has the problem that you”ve built all the attractions at some point. In Park Beyond, the strong, very flexible roller coaster construction, but also the pimping of the individual rides could be fun in the long run.
