Park Beyond preview: Cosy coaster doesn’t need sick bags

Rollercoaster and theme park games have been a solid part of the gaming landscape for as long as I can remember. There’s such a thrill to becoming your own creative maestro, and Park Beyond does not disappoint when it comes to allowing you to flex your building skills.

Bandai Namco’s genre entry takes the limits of your imagination and stretches them to all new horizons, making you truly feel like the Willy Wonka of the theme park world - albeit without the safety risks of one of his tours.

Your imagination really is the limit here, with a huge bag of tools and tricks at your disposal. It brings a sense of fantasy and larger-than-life rides to life, something we haven’t experienced in a theme park game for a long time.

Off the wall, through the wall, and back over the wall

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Planet Coaster and Rollercoaster Tycoon have given players the option of creating some wild rides, but the level of detail when it comes to customisation in Park Beyond elevates it way above all of those before it. Coaster tracks can weave and loop around tight bends and can even travel through objects that have been placed around the park.

A good example of this is the fact you can have your track run through the centre ring of a huge doughnut statue, and this modular setup means your attractions feel less like separate pieces and more like a cohesive whole (or should that be ‘doughnut hole?).

All of these mechanics are really easily conveyed to you through a breezy tutorial level that has you expanding your coasters through a busy city, full of buildings to wind your track around or elevate your coaster track over.

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It’s a great way to not only teach you the fundamentals but demonstrate that this isn’t your average park builder. And, just as you can in the games I grew up playing, you can put yourself on the tracks in first-person mode to enjoy your creation, too.

It can be difficult to incentivize creativity, especially in a genre where each park can be played ad infinitum, but Park Beyond does a great job of nudging you to try new things by constantly unfolding its toybox to include features like rivers, gaps in the floor and high buildings.

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These can be tackled with unique enhancements to your coaster tracks, like a catapult that launches carts across greater distances, or a subterranean tunnel.

My first creation had me catapulting off ramps, threading through huge doughnut statues and twirling around buildings - creating a super inventive coaster that blurred the line between thrillseeking and the daily commute.

Big Dream Theme Park

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The game’s campaign takes these disparate bits and pieces of the theme park construction kit and attempts to wrap a narrative around it, too. Rather than genre contemporaries that tend to be scenario-based, Park Beyond introduces its parks with backstories and characters that interlink as you progress.

That means that rather than working toward an arbitrary star rating, I found myself digging deep into park history and, well, “lore”. While the objectives are ones that will no doubt be familiar to theme park game fans, such as rebuilding areas of a park or getting a certain amount of visitors, it is all presented in a way which is way more narrative-driven rather than simply plonking you in a field and not letting you progress until you have gained a certain number of visitors or an amount of profit.

Final Thoughts:

Park Beyond takes the well-known style of the theme park management game and layers on a robust modular creation system and a surprisingly fun story on top.

It doesn’t reinvent the formula, but like a recently reopened ride, it brings glitz and polish to something I’ve loved for years.