Probably one of the harder things to manage in a tycoon game is the balancing. Keeping the game entertaining while also holding a realistic aspect of how visitors would interact with a park is big for the realism side of the experience. However, Bandai Namco had a little freedom with the realism side of things in their latest theme park tycoon game Park Beyond. While there was still plenty of balancing going on in the details, the concepts from the rides to the workers can all be made to be only possible within a virtual world. With this bit of freedom and creative expression given to players, how does the game hold up?

Story

Starting out, you build an imaginative roller coaster through the city. This engineering prowess doesn’t go unnoticed as the multi-theme park owner Phil notices your talent and quickly scoops you up to help create his new few parks. Of course, enthusiastic Phil doesn’t work alone and so he introduces you to the more strict personality, Izzy. Together, with Izzy crunching the numbers and Phil encouraging expression, you all come up with a plan for the first park and get to work.

After this first park, they will take you from project to project and give you the chance to be the lead in the creation and growth of each theme park. They do help with guidance here and there, but designs, management, and tasks are left up to you to manage.

The campaign for the game is a nice touch for a tycoon title and it gives the player a chance to learn about all the aspects this game offers bit by bit. Each chapter of the campaign will have you focus on different challenges and provide tasks that bring the mindset of running a theme park on your own, successfully, more plausible. These games always have so many icons and options that many opportunities and challenges get lost in the mix, but with the campaign taking you through each step (and letting go of your hand by the third park), it helps players learn the game and gain ideas when they head over to the Sandbox mode.

Gameplay

If you are new to tycoon games, it is worth going through the campaign. Even if you aren’t new to tycoons, you might find it interesting as it isn’t often these type of games get a full campaign to experience along the game. During the campaign, you will be shown the different aspects of the game and how to manage it through the form of tips and letting you just work on a theme park.

What I liked about the campaign is that it gives you a chance to make a park in different areas, giving you a taste of each theme and location they offer, and allowing you the chance to play through the bad ideas that ultimately make parks look bad. I’m sure I am not the only one that finds myself placing buildings or forgetting essentials when I build my first location, and thanks to the campaign, I can get those out of the way early. You can always come back to each chapter’s theme park to play with it further, but once you complete the objectives, you can move on.

Once you are done with messing with the campaign, regardless if you finish it or not, you can then head over to Sandbox mode and build a park however you want. First, you will need to pick a location and there is an impressive collection of places to build your theme park.

Running a theme park requires a lot of parts to run successfully. You need rides, bathrooms, shops, food, drinks, employees, benches, trash cans, and so much more. When you start your sandbox park, you will get to pick a difficulty that will adjust the upkeep management difficulty and how much money you can start with. The good thing is, you can take out a loan from a handful of providers to help get you started, and as long as you can pay them back it is a helpful way to get a jump on the fun.

The real challenge to a park is expanding. It seems like a theme park can only truly function profitably with up to three branches. Once you start getting too far from the entrance of the park, it gets a lot harder to get visitors interested in going to those areas. I found many areas that I built, despite having a fun concept behind them, being left underused and thus everything there was tanking money instead of making any. Due to this, I found myself having multiple small-ish parks rather than a big one, which is a bit unfortunate.

Balancing everything in the park as you go is hard, but my biggest tip is how to use the ‘Impossify’ aspect of this game. The main thing that makes this game stand out is how they let you turn aspects of the park into a literally impossible attraction that could never be done in real life. Your instincts may be to put all the upgrades into shops and rides, but you really want to upgrade your workers. Having entertainers, cleaners, and maintenance workers that are impossibly good at their job turned a great profit. Who wouldn’t want to go to a theme park that is clean, always functioning, and full of fun mascots after all?

Of course, there are cool things you get from Impossifying your rides and shops, plus you can raise your price a bit, but they don’t always pull the attraction you hoped for. Some rides that seemed like they would pull the most money ended up costing more to keep active. But hey, at least you can always ride each ride with a rider point-of-view camera from any seat on the ride!

Other than the theme park details, as the player you have a HUD that can seem overwhelming at first but it all makes sense once you get it down. The campaign helps with this, but you get a lot of cool tools to work with. Some of the more helpful options are the happiness meter, which works like a color-coded infer-red light that highlights customers to show how happy they are in different areas. Then there are the feedback sections and actual analytic charts that can be checked per ride, per shop, or in the park’s overall status. This is helpful to make small adjustments throughout the park to keep your profit margins in the green. A lot of the tools are what you would expect, but it is something to make sure you know before fully diving into the experience.

Audio and Visual

The sound effects for this ride are pretty standard for a theme park tycoon and they do a good job pulling off the crowd sound effects. When there are parts that include main characters from the campaign, they do have voice work behind them and they are actually rather impressively done. Behind it all is a decent music theme that adjusts to let ride music and other sound effects from the park take over in volume, which was a nice touch when watching for specific aspects.

Visually, the game holds a cartoon art style throughout. However, the rides are all very interesting in design and their impossified versions are a roll of the dice on interest scale. Sometimes they are interesting and sometimes they become just silly. Either way, it is fun to ride the ride through the customer's point-of-view camera, especially when you build your own coaster!

Replayability

Of course, a tycoon game has replayability! As I explained before, this game seems to have the best successful parks when you have smaller parks with only a few branches off from the entrance, which means you will want to have multiple parks on multiple maps. It definitely helps that they offer multiple maps to build off of, all offering incredible scenery.

What It Could Have Done Better

With the campaign being a way to add a story to the tycoon experience and a proper way to show each aspect of the game to the player, I feel like it could have been a bit better with hand-holding. When they wanted to put focus on a new icon, they don’t highlight it or point it out and instead just show you the icon design to find somewhere on the HUD. Not just that, but only a few chapters in you are given a challenge park and it felt like the hardest part of the campaign for me. The rides weren’t great, the funds were low, there wasn’t much help, and it felt like they were just throwing you into a hard situation a bit too early.

The controls for building a controller can be a bit challenging. On mouse and keyboard, it is more probable to handle overall, but playing this game with a gamepad felt so infuriating! I’m honestly not sure how anybody is going to be able to play this on a console where they have to use the controller and don’t have any other options. When I played this with the gamepad, I barely made it one hour before I switched because of how frustrated I got with it.

Verdict

Park Beyond is a very entertaining theme park tycoon! I really enjoyed playing this game, after I switched to playing with the mouse and keyboard. But even as much as I liked the game, if you are stuck playing on a gamepad, then you might be in for a bumpy ride getting used to the challenging controls. However, if you are PC and can play with your mouse and keyboard set up, then you will have a great time with this title. I see myself putting plenty more hours into the game and I recommend you check it out yourself if you are interested in tycoon titles.

Park Beyond is available now for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam.