Ever wanted to create the theme park of your dreams? Well Park Beyond is looking to give you the tools to do just that. Park Beyond is Limbic Entertainment’s upcoming theme park sim, which is being published by Bandai Namco. I recently went hands on with the simulation game and experienced the highs and lows of rollercoaster creation and theme park management.
Limbic Entertainment has shifted from city building in Tropico 6 to building theme parks in Park Beyond. The upcoming game aims to remove any limits and let you dream up the wildest creations, with extensive tools and modules which can be incorporated into coaster designs. During my hands-on time I was able to play around with a few of these modules. In the first mission, players are tasked with creating a basic coaster, moulding it through the city streets. The city has plenty of buildings which are practically begging to have a roller coaster built on top, which makes getting to grips with the building mechanics amazingly easy. Before long, you’ve got the makings of your first roller coaster!
Roller coasters are at the heart of the Park Beyond experience, these coasters can be as simple or as complex as you’d like. Using modules, players can take their coasters to new heights, literally. In the first mission, players can pick from two modules which are relatively similar in vein, but spice up coasters nonetheless. The first module allows trains to be fired across a set gap, in a massive cannon, giving the coaster a huge speed boost, and the second involves a stunt ramp which requires a lot of speed coming into it to successfully make the jump. Both sound pretty cool right? I mean health and safety would probably have a field day if someone tried to incorporate either in real life, so thankfully Limbic Entertainment’s sim lets us experience it for ourselves without risk.
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Take a ride on my rollercoaster from the first Park Beyond mission:
I was also fortunate enough to go hands on with an in-development version of the sandbox mode, which I’d hoped would help me to unleash my creativity further, and don’t get me wrong it did, but I couldn’t help but feel the experience catered more towards coasters than it did the overall theme park experience. Whilst the sandbox mode is very much in development, it’d be unfair to comment on the bugs I ran into whilst playing Park Beyond, however hopefully between now and release, Limbic has enough time to iron these out and create a well rounded and bugless sandbox experience.
Park Beyond lets players level up rides, staff and facilities with a feature called Impossification, which essentially takes bog standard theme park rides, and turns them into something you won’t have seen before, not even in real life. Impossifying overexaggerates and brings rides to the next level, the likes of which you won’t have seen in a theme park game before. Players will be tasked with impossifying park elements throughout their Park Beyond journey.
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Surprisingly, Park Beyond has a story-driven campaign, featuring a handful of characters, each with different views on Impossification. Players will assume the role of a visionary, attending pitch meetings to help troubleshoot theme park problems. Throughout the pitching process, players are defining the goals for each mission, before taking on the theme park themselves.
Just like most theme park sims, Park Beyond features a host of deep management features, giving players complete control over prices and colour schemes throughout their park. If you are a seasoned management sim player you’ll love these, but on a surface level there’s still a lot of fun to be had just building rides. Park Beyond isn’t all rollercoasters though, the game also includes a handful of flat rides and stalls to fluff out your park. Whilst this was heavily limited in the first mission and sandbox mode, developers have assured us that plenty more will be included when Park Beyond ships. There’ll also be a host of themes that players can use to further jazz up parks.
Interested in trying Park Beyond? If you are fortunate enough to be attending Gamescom this year, you’ll be able to go hands-on with the first mission which features an introduction to the game's rollercoaster editor, as well as the sandbox mode detailed above.
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All in all, Park Beyond is a promising theme park sim that really does have unlimited potential. It grants players a host of tools to unleash their creativity and create rides and experiences unseen before in a theme park game of this nature. That said, developers Limbic Entertainment do still have quite a way to go to get the game ready for release. Which brings us to the release date, Park Beyond was initially slated to release this year, however Limbic Entertainment wants a little longer to make sure the game releases at the standard they envisioned for players. As a result, Park Beyond is currently set to release in 2023, on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X | S and PC.
Featured Image Credit: Park Beyond / Credit: Bandai NamcoTopics: PlayStation 5, Bandai Namco, Xbox Series X