Park Beyond is not a very subtle game, either in the sense of being flashy and over-the-top or in the sense of not hiding exactly which other games it has been influenced by. There are hundreds of games that try to ride on the coattails of "Fortnite" or "Call of Duty," but not as many that try to emulate 2000s management sims like "Roller Coaster Tycoon.

As I did with other sims 20 years ago (oh, did SimCity 2000 really come out in 1993?), I initially decided to skip Park Beyond's campaign and jump into the sandbox mode. At this point, the game lightly suggested that I should at least try the tutorial before starting. Thankfully, the tutorial was brief and relatively easy to digest. To Park Beyond's credit, I felt well prepared to tackle building my own theme park after just five minutes of listening.

After a few hours of toying around in the sandbox mode, I circled back around and started the campaign mode properly. It didn't take me long to realize that most of what was explained in the tutorial had been stretched out for the campaign, only to be dumbed down further. While the campaign has fully voiced cutscenes and a (rather lame) attempt at a story, it never stops feeling like a long tutorial. I got bored about halfway through and stopped going back to the sandbox mode.

Given how clear and to the point the actual tutorial is, I would recommend ignoring the campaign and saving yourself the trouble of spending time with the waxwork characters. They create this disturbing, uncanny valley atmosphere, constantly attempting to be humorous but missing more often than they hit. It's best to avoid them altogether and get right to the main point of Park Beyond, which is to create a giant, absurd roller coaster.

Building your own elaborate ride is arguably the most fun part of Park Beyond. While I struggled a bit with the physics engine and the initially unwieldy controls, the tools for laying out your own park and customizing your roller coaster are surprisingly intuitive and, importantly, unrestrictive. The end result has to work physically, but you have a lot of freedom to create what you want. Especially if, like me, you want to have fun with an unlikely design, you may need to do a little testing and experimentation to make it work, but "Park Beyond" is helpful because it gives you a clear visual indication of what is working and what is not. The node system allows the rides to be modified by splitting or manipulating parts of the track that have already been placed.

There is also a fairly large selection of stores, restaurants, scenery, and pre-built rides that can be used to expand the park, available in a variety of colors to match the park and upgradeable using "impositions." Impossifications are cute little mechanics that redirect the joy of park visitors to buffing up the rides and facilities, making them more spectacular and fantastic. This is most noticeable with rides, which go through two elaborate and, yes, impossible changes, becoming your most frenzied daydreams, or nightmarish roller coasters depending on your disposition, to provide a whole new experience for your customers. Making the store and staff impossible is not very exciting mechanically and mostly just increases profit margins, but at least it comes with some fun visual changes, such as the entertainment team becoming Pac-Man's ghost.

Terrain manipulation options are also vast, with the ability to smooth surfaces, create large bodies of water, or carve out deep canyons. Many of the more impressive roller coaster add-ons can manipulate the terrain at will, looping passengers over lakes, through tunnels underground, or even through man-made gaps in the environment. Combine this freedom of course creation with a toy box of items at your disposal, and no two parks will ever be the same. A truly impressive set of tools.

We tested Park Beyond on two different builds, and given the system requirements (i7-7700K, GTX 970, 12GB RAM), even the weakest build (i7-7820X, RTX 2060 SUPER, 16GB RAM) should handle the game comfortably at recommended settings It was. Unfortunately, load times were quite heavy and suffered a noticeable slowdown when the perk started to grow a bit. The game would have run smoothly with the better hardware we tested the game on, but few people would go out and buy an RTX 4080 to run Park Beyond properly.

To make matters worse, we always encountered the same serious bug no matter which build we played. There were frequent crashes to the desktop with no error messages, the music in mission and sandbox modes had a terrible habit of stuttering endlessly, and texture clipping was frequent when using the optional camera mode. In addition, many missions refused to progress altogether, even when conditions were met, such as placing vehicles in specific locations or selling specific items in specific quantities in the store. Most infuriating was that the quick select option in the admin menu would bug out permanently, teleporting you to the completely wrong store or staff.

I also have no idea whether some of the criteria for a successful park are bugs or the result of opaque design decisions. The second time I tried to build a park in sandbox mode, I gave myself a huge starting budget and built several expensive and ridiculously large custom roller coasters. I followed the tutorial's advice to build a variety of flat rides, concessions, restrooms, staff rooms, and lovingly decorated benches to keep the guests happy, but for some reason no one wanted to ride the custom rides I built. I gradually lowered the prices of the rides, eventually giving up and making them free, but no matter what I did, they were still "left out". Other sandbox playthroughs I tried did not have this problem - either because I used them too quickly, or it was just a rare bug.

What was particularly odd was that it is usually rather simplistic and too easy to successfully complete a park in "Park Beyond". To add to the difficulty, you are only required to provide basic necessities to customers, hire the right amount of staff, and occasionally use the "heat map" feature to target unsanitary or underdeveloped areas of the park. Its all very simple and mind boggling. When you're not actively building coasters or modifying the layout, there's little to keep you interested.

Park Beyond feels like a difficult game to critique. If one can pardon one cheesy metaphor, the game's main appeal is impressive, but it lacks amenities. The system for building and customizing parks is truly impressive, one of the best I've seen in a sim game. However, the actual management is so inadequate that it all feels tacked on, and without a solid campaign to challenge you, the experience feels flimsy.

If all you want to do is go straight into sandbox mode, give it unlimited funds, and build an unfeasibly huge roller coaster, "Park Beyond" is worth getting. But if you are looking for more depth than that, and if you are the type who is more interested in management than loop-de-loop physics, I would not recommend it at all.

While I have tried not to dwell on comparisons between "Park Beyond" and its obvious inspiration, "Roller Coaster Tycoon," at some point you have to put the two side by side. The thing is how "Park Beyond" has not evolved its core formula and its management system seems archaic. The creativity and freedom in building rides and designing parks is light years ahead of what was possible in earlier sims, but it is so rough, buggy, and lacking in depth that even the strengths of "Park Beyond" feel more like style than substance.