Park Beyond review: A health and safety inspector's worst nightmare

Park Beyond launches on Xbox today, offering you a chance to build incredible and unconventional theme parks. Tom wielded the power of "Impossification" to see what delights he could dream up.

Impossification, the slogan of Bandai Namco's Park Beyond, is a tool that allows you to create rides that Rollercoaster Tycoon could only dream of — and cause health and safety inspectors to wake in puddles of anxious sweat. Double-wheeled Ferris wheels, people-launching slingshots, rail-less rollercoaster tracks, and more offer your theme park guests adrenaline-fuelled bursts of fun, and I've been hooked on it for the last week.

Park Beyond launch trailer

Much like other theme park management games, Park Beyond offers a base campaign mode that slowly ups the difficulty with each stage, and a sandbox mode that lets you run free on a variety of maps with as much or as little difficulty as you'd like. Naturally, the main gameplay hook can be found in its campaign, which will test your management capabilities as it incrementally increases the difficulty by adding new challenges and mechanics — due to a couple of technical issues that cause the game to crash infrequently, though, it unfortunately, has a tendency to test your patience as well!

Starting out as a young dreamer scribbling wild ride ideas on a bit of paper before folding them into a paper plane to throw out of the window, Park Beyond begins by teaching us the fundamentals of rollercoaster building by following the paper plane through the streets of our neighborhood. It's a cool concept and gives us a chance to meet some of the main characters before beginning on the eight-mission-long campaign journey. Once you step into the second mission, that's when Park Beyond layers on some cool ideas that help it stand out from the competition. Before beginning to build each theme park we're pulled into pitch meetings with the management team to make decisions on how to approach each park. You're given a handful of choices to make, which act as objective modifiers when playing in a mission — each mission gives you a number of objectives to complete in order to win. If you've failed a mission for whatever reason, making different decisions in the pitch meeting helps you identify better ways to approach your park.

Starting out is simple enough, with the first main mission requiring you to manage the profit/loss of a park as you choose which rides and facilities are best suited for your guests, with guests being separated into families, adults, and teens. Each attraction will cater to different audiences, so you have control over who you want to market the park to, or you can just mix it up with all three. Using tools like the heatmap gives you quick access to your guests' needs at the click of a couple of buttons thanks to everything being tied to one toggled menu. Before long, though, the difficulty begins to increase as each of Park Beyond's mechanics is introduced.

You need to manage a number of different factors when trying to make a park successful. Naturally, income is one of the most important, so making sure costs like engineering, staff salary, loan repayments, and whatnot don't outweigh your base income is a must — have your books be in the negative for three in-game months and you'll go bankrupt. On top of that, though, is Park Level, which is split into two factors that increase your Park Appeal: Fun Rating and Cleanliness. To increase your fun rating, you can build rides that have higher fun ratings, hire entertainers to walk around your park, and hire paramedics to treat nausea. As for Cleanliness, hiring janitors to keep the park clean, and placing enough bins and toilets will increase it. With both being catered for your Park Level will rise, opening up new attractions and increasing the number of guests you can have in your park. It can be pretty challenging to keep on top of it all at times, and just adding one attraction that doesn't sit well can send your balance books spiraling out of control due to guests moving to other parts of your park. Many times, I've gone from a good healthy profit margin to crippling debt without really knowing what the hell had changed. It's a tough balancing act, but the roster of funky rides and facilities means you usually have enough variety to get things back in order.

Park Beyond already has a ton of exciting rides you can play with, which range from classics like carousels and haunted houses to rollercoasters that fire the carts out of cannons. There is a ton to play with, and its robust rollercoaster creation tools give you the ability to tunnel through the ground, send the passengers soaring through the air, and more. I've lost countless hours seeing what wild things can be done, and it just never seems to lose its appeal. But Park Beyond wants you to do more with those boring conventional rides, even those we would call extreme in the real world, and gives you the ability to Impossify them, as well as your food, drink, and souvenir shops. To access Impossification you need to earn a resource called Amazement, which can be earnt by using rides that generate higher amounts of it. Amazement is collected in a bar at the top of your screen, and once full, gives you an Impossification charge. It costs one charge to Impossify a staff member, which increases their effectiveness around the park, and two charges to Impossify shops, which give your guests a temporary Fun Rating boost if they buy the items — as long as they're feeling happy with their experience. Saving up for five charges, though, gives you the ability to Impossify your rides and turn them into something spectacular. The Space Training ride for instance can turn into a rocket ship and blast your guests into the stratosphere, the Slingshot literally fires them out of their seats into a funnel, and Robot Battle turns the ride into a gargantuan version of Robot Wars. It's by far one of the best things Park Beyond offers, and seeing a park lit up at night with rides soaring through the sky is visually impressive, but the caveat is that it can pose a few performance issues.

Even when played on Xbox Series X, there are times when the game stutters, especially when your park is crowded with guests, and you've got a few Impossified attractions. Most of the time it's smooth but it can get jumpy when clicking through menus and whatnot. The biggest issue comes from crashes, though, and this week I've experienced my fair share of them, which at times can cause game-breaking issues that force you to restart a mission. I'm currently stuck on mission 5, which asks you to complete challenges that can be found around the map. You need to complete nine of them to complete the mission, but if you crash it resets you to zero while leaving the challenges as complete. Add that to some challenges just not unlocking and it's a real pain.

As for the Park Beyond achievements, it looks like a pretty simple affair, or it will be once a patch fixes the progression-blocking bugs. Only the main eight mission-based achievements pose any real challenge, and the rest will be unlocked along the way or will be achievable in the sandbox mode. I've picked up 20 of the 33 achievements so far, and bar the one for completing mission 4 not unlocking, everything seems to be working as it should be. I wouldn't think it'll be too much of a grind either, as you can set the sandbox mode to free play and smash out the miscellaneous and accumulative achievements without too much effort.

Summary

Park Beyond offers a delightful theme park sandbox to challenge your imagination. With a vast number of attractions and the possibility to turn them into stomach-churning experiences with Impossification, Bandai Namco has built a theme park management game well worth visiting. It's held back slightly by some poor performance issues, but following some post-launch support, Park Beyond has the potential to make an impact on the genre.

* Tom played around 30 hours of Park Beyond on Xbox Series X, unlocking 20 achievements in the process. A key for the game was provided by Bandai Namco for this review.

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Written by Tom West

Tom has been playing video games since he was old enough to hold a controller, experimenting with a number of systems until he eventually fell in love with Xbox. With a passion for the platform, he decided to make a career out of it, and now happily spends his days writing about that which he loves. If he’s not hunting for Xbox achievements, you’ll likely find him somewhere in The Elder Scrolls Online or fighting for survival in Battlefield.