Not only can you cobble together entire structures from hundreds of building and environment pieces to build literal castles and the like, but even pre-fab facilities can have most of their bits and pieces customised for colour and even sound. It’s not just the operational side of things, the nitty-gritty of the finances and marketing jargon that I’m sure many will froth, but the aesthetics of your theme parks are wide open for personal interpretation. At this stage the game definitely still feels early and the UI in its current form especially isn’t particularly pleasing to look at or use, but thumbing through the menus I think people are going to be very happy with how much granular control there is over every aspect of your park. Choice paralysis struck pretty quickly and time was short, so sadly I can’t report that I actually built a park that anyone in the right minds would go to, but I had fun looking at the laundry list of bits and pieces that I could place down as well as looking at the options I had for flatrides and different facilities. With smart keyboard controls (that should hopefully translate quite well to a controller) that allow height, pitch and yaw to be adjusted on the fly, it’s great to be able to quickly snap together a giant ride that tunnels through mountainsides and shoots riders through cannons and then go back and really finesse it so that those riders don’t die in the process.Īfter messing with coasters for a while, I did also get the opportunity to quickly dive into the game’s Sandbox mode and go nuts with whatever I wanted to do in a blank slate of a park. Park Beyond‘s intelligent snapping system means that chucking down sections of track is easy as pie, while being able to go back and scrap or improve prior sections is simple enough that I never felt like I needed to agonise over any initial placements. It serves as a set-up to a thin narrative and introduces some characters along the way, but importantly it’s a primer on just how intuitive and malleable the coaster-building experience is. Straight off the bat the game’s tutorial sequence (and the main component of the Gamescom demo) is a how-to on building rollercoasters that sees you construct a coaster that creeps out of an apartment window, through city streets and into a nearby theme park. While the game’s marketing will no doubt focus heavily on its unique twist of ‘Impossification’, which is transforming coasters, flatrides and even shops and staff into impossible versions of themselves for fun and profit, coming off the back of this preview I really believe the secret sauce is in how adaptable and customisable the game is as a whole. For all of the good things to come from those games though, Park Beyond instantly flags itself as a massive step up in scope and production values from what I’d normally expect of the genre. Park building and management games have been a quiet staple in the industry for as long as I can remember, going back to the days of Theme Park, Sim Park and Rollercoaster Tycoon right up to more modern interpretations like Planet Coaster. That big thing is Park Beyond, and after both seeing a presentation from the team on their progress with the game and also getting my hands on an early build, I’m confident that this was the right direction for them.
Coming off the back of that, the studio says it wanted to be done with city-builders but also still leverage the skills gained there for the next big thing. Limbic Entertainment has quite a diverse back catalogue of developed games from role-playing to open-world survival, but its most recent project went deep into sim management territory with Tropico 6.
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