Park Beyond Reviews
Park Beyond's premise is an exciting one that's full of promise, but its technical issues, gameplay limitations and core fundamentals hold it back from being a truly polished park tycoon title.
Park Beyond goes beyond just a fresh coat of paint in the genre and sets a new standard for future games with innovative ideas and challenges. It invokes fun and nostalgia reminiscent of Theme Park, which must have been its inspiration.
Park Beyond is an interesting time with an interesting concept. Impossification is a great feature, allowing players to let their imagination run wild, all while meeting the checks and balances of a sim game. Sadly, the game is marred by bugs and crashes that have happened more times than I normally forgive titles for. Add a UI that feels unfinished and unpolished, and the experience really sours the more you play. Despite using a powerful rig, Park Beyond still has some hitches, but it's great that the developers are hard at work on fixes.
Park Beyond is in a better place now than when it first dropped into digital storefronts, but even if some of its glitches were fixed, something else hinders it even more: the lack of content available on basic versions of the game. There’s just not a lot in it to make a savefile last for more than half an hour at a time, with most of its content updates being planned as paid DLC, which is just unacceptable for a game as expensive as this one.
As much as it inspires fun, the larger your theme park ambitions grow, the more Park Beyond throws extreme roadblocks in your way. There is still hope it finds a more wholesome balance in the future, but for now, the quest for the perfect park feels unfairly locked away.
However, it is also a fact that not all the gears of "Park Beyond" are running smoothly yet. The road construction system sometimes leads to quite strange results, which can often only be ironed out by demolition and terraforming measures. Some challenges that have already been met are not correctly recognized, in some places the balancing seems half-baked, and if the Ferris wheel occasionally stands still for no reason despite high maintenance values, it is quite necessary to shake your head. However, if you overlook these hopefully soon patched teething troubles, what remains is a motivating construction simulation with damn cool rides, a terrific roller coaster editor and the graphically as well as playfully creatively implemented impossification mechanics.
Review in German | Read full review
Park Beyond is one of the most satisfying, enjoyable management sims I’ve played in years and is the spiritual successor to Theme Park I’ve waited over twenty years for. On PS5, there’s definitely controller frustrations with the DualSense, as well as weighted cameras, in-game pathing issues and texture breakdowns, so playing on PC is probably the way forward. But issues aside, if you’re looking for a game to play to relax or to really test your skills, this one does it all.
Whether you're wanting to get down to the nitty-gritty of it all and submerge yourself in graphs and statistics or kick back without restraint and build to your heart's desire, the sky is the limit in Park Beyond.
Park Beyond from Limbic Entertainment offers a fun, easily accessible theme park simulator experience that has its strengths mostly in its sandbox mode and in building wacky rollercoasters. The short campaign offers a good learning curve but delivers only a very thin story. Sadly technical issues on PC and sometimes a lack of variation (e.g. only three coaster types!) tarnish the otherwise solid game. We hope that these issues will be adressed in the near future.
Review in German | Read full review