Limbic Entertainment and BANDAI NAMCO have teamed up to bring us Park Beyond, a fun-filled rollercoaster theme-park creation simulator. Let your imagination and creative juices free and build your dream theme park, filling it with custom rollercoasters while taking in some beautiful environments and listening to the excited shouts of your guests.

There are two main modes you can jump into, the first being the Campaign, and the second being a Sandbox mode. The campaign is some good fun to jump into, and the tutorial is a rollercoaster worth of fun. It introduces you to a young energetic female by the name of Blaze, and after seeing your drawing of a roller coaster, she decides to teach you how to build them – and what better place than the suburb you live in?

When the tutorial is finished, you meet someone by the name of Phil, a theme park veteran who would like your help to run his parks, and you are dropped into a pre-built theme park. that needs some serious work to make it turn a profit and make it fun for everyone. There are currently eight missions in total, each taking place on different maps and their own unique themes and rides, and they each have their own ending objectives. They all feature a little bit of a tutorial to help you learn about things such as keeping your park clean and expanding your land, with the final mission bringing it all together in an epic showdown between yourself and a rival theme-park owner, hell-bent on seeing you fail.

The second game mode is a more traditional Sandbox, and this is where you can let your creative juices flow. Once again, there is another small tutorial, however, this is more designed to guide you in starting with a blank canvas, as opposed to the missions featuring a partially built park. There are a few different options when it comes to setting this up, such as giving yourself some extra cash to start with, adjusting the upkeep on various rides and attractions, and deciding whether or not rides will need maintenance.

Of course, there is also the option of giving yourself unlimited money and building whatever you want. You’ll have access to a variety of maps, and every flat ride is available in this mode, which will let you set up various themed areas if you so chose. There’s even an option to custom-build shops to place in your park, using basic working elements and a variety of assets to create your own decorative locations.

There are currently three styles of rollercoaster you can build in the game, and each can be further modified by changing the cars and the colours that make up the tracks. The first is a Standard Coaster, your normal, run-of-the-mill style that doesn’t get too wild – the one the whole family can enjoy. The Wide Coaster is exactly what it sounds like, offering to carry more passengers along the tracks, but a little more restricted in terms of how tight it can turn, and then there’s the Wild Mouse, the adrenaline junkie’s dream, which can make tighter twists and sharper turns.

Depending on how you build the tracks, you’ll get a number of ratings including Fun, Profitability, and Amazement, and these will change as you apply Hooks – labels that come with an objective you need to complete during its construction, such as the aforementioned canons. There’s a nice variety of pre-built rides that feature the same rating system, and while you can Impossify these, they are still pre-defined, so you don’t have any control over how they look.

A cool feature that sets Park Beyond apart from other park-building games is the Impossification mechanic. Points build up as you play, filling up a pencil that can be used to “Impossify” the rides throughout your dream park, taking what may be a fairly lame ride such as Dodge’em Cars, and turning it into something incredible, such as a near-vertical pinball machine where the cars become the ball, bouncing around on bumpers, and being slapped back by flippers, or a ride similar to The CLAW at Dreamworld, where the disk detaches on the upwards swing, somehow manages to land back on the swinging arm every time.

Even your custom-built rollercoasters can be adjusted in strange ways, such as canons that fire the train through the air, only to land back on the track and continue its journey, or cars that separate throughout the trip, taking their own path and only reconnect once they’re at the end of their journey. Unfortunately, even with all the wild and wacky things you can do with a rollercoaster, the park patrons generally don’t seem particularly interested in riding your custom-crafted rollercoaster, which leads to a bit of disappointment after spending a decent amount of time building it. They much preferred the pre-built flat rides and spending money on food and drink. There have been a few people who have mentioned this as well, so hopefully this is resolved in a not-so-distant update.

The park management system is amazing and reminded me of something like Roller Coaster Tycoon, where the player can control every aspect of the park, including the placement of paths and queues, rides and attractions, and everything you need to maintain the park to the highest quality. You can do everything from setting ticket prices right down to adjusting the height restrictions on the rides.

You need to make sure you have basic amenities, such as food stalls, bathrooms, benches, and bins strategically placed around your park, otherwise, your customers will be hesitant to give up their precious money, and you’ll need to employ cleaners to change the bins and clean the toilets, medics to see to sick or injured guests, and retail staff to run your food and souvenir stands to keep a steady flow of income, and not doing so will result in the park looking like the local dump. Like all good tycoons, you need to make sure the money is in the green, so you’ll want to make sure your profit exceeds your expenses.

Blaze explains the controls in the tutorial, and Park Beyond can use either a keyboard and mouse or a controller, although they do strongly encourage you to use the official Xbox or PlayStation for the best results. The UI is simple to navigate, with clear pictures on the left side of the screen, and other details such as ride speeds on the lower right. It’s very intuitive and easy to learn, and it’s set up in a way to give you complete control, but it’s let down by the placement system, particularly when it comes to paths and building rollercoasters.

Placing an initial path was quite easy, but there are issues when it comes to linking one to another. Sometimes, one path will be built under another, and this leads to the AI characters not being able to properly walk around your park. Deleting and replacing a path will typically make this worse, often resulting in strange texture glitches where the path spawns under the grass or shows disconnected areas and sudden stops. Placing the rails for your dream coaster can also be a bit of a pain, with parts not properly matching up or outright failing to place where they’re needed, even when it looks like it should be a smooth connection.

I absolutely adored the graphics in Park Beyond. It had that super cartoonish vibe you expect to see from park-building games, but they manage to capture a lot of detail, and this almost gives it a believable feeling. There were so many bright colors that keep you glued to the screen, and aside from the placement issues I mentioned before, the environmental aspects look absolutely stunning, with gorgeous water and surprisingly detailed grass.

You can even jump on the rides and experience your creations in a first-person view, like many other park builders, and you’ll be riding alongside beautifully detailed 3D characters. When it comes to sound, the first thing you are graced with is this upbeat tune, drawing you into the game almost instantly. I was surprised when Blaze had spoken lines during the tutorial, and all I’m going to say is WOW! I was not expecting a title like this to have a full-blown campaign with voice acting, and this really helps to get you more invested in the process.

While building and exploring the park, a fun and gentle tune plays in the background, with birds singing in the background, but as you start to zoom and get closer to the rides and guests, they fade out slowly as the sounds of the park get louder, eventually drowning out nature with pumping music, the rhythmic clank of a rollercoaster gliding along the track, and the screams and shouts of the guests enjoying the rides – perfectly recreating the theme-park experience.

Park Beyond has a whole lot of potential, offering fun gameplay, beautiful scenery, and a little bit more than your standard park-building game in the form of impossification, allowing for some incredibly imaginative rides. It aims to give players complete control over their theme park, but it’s let down by some not-so-friendly placement options that result in awkward or broken connections, and this can turn into poor AI pathing with guests getting stuck, or the track on your dream rollercoaster looking like the Hulk decided to smash.

It’s also disappointing when all the hard work you put into building the rollercoaster is ignored by patrons in favour of drag-and-drop rides, but I remain hopeful that they’ll listen to feedback and resolve these problems in the near future.

Written by: Hayden Nelson