Park Beyond distinguishes itself from other theme park management games by embracing the realm of absurdity with its unconventional attractions that defy logic — imagine strapping cannon modules onto your coaster tracks, catapulting passengers through the air amidst the bustling park. The game starts with a touch of silliness, as you begin by constructing a coaster down the fire exit of your apartment. While players are promised an exciting journey of creation, as a fan of strategy games myself, I dived into the game with a heightened anticipation for its management gameplay.

Right from the start of the campaign, Park Beyond immerses you in a tutorial on the ins and outs of coaster building, which is undeniably one of the main selling points of a theme park management game. The game grants you a wide range of freedom to sculpt the most extravagant roller coaster you've ever dreamed of. Moreover, you possess the power to fine-tune the pitch, yaw, roll, and height of those tracks, meticulously shaping them to perfection and bringing to life the roller coaster you've always yearned for. Complementary features like Terraforming also take the concept of creative expression to extraordinary heights, where you can mold the terrain according to your preferences, laying tracks that wind around majestic hills or even tunnel through them.

In Park Beyond, Profit, Fun, Amazement, and Cleanliness take center stage as the key resources that demand our attention. Each coaster and Flat Ride offers a unique blend of Profit, Fun, and Amazement, and the secret to success lies in the art of balance where you must manage the diverse array of attractions within your park, ensuring a steady flow of these vital resources. Among them, Profit is a no-brainer, as the park will be shut down after three consecutive months of financial loss. Fun and Cleanliness makes up the Park Appeal levels, which unlocks new coasters, Flat Rides, shops and more as you level up your park. Amazement, on the other hand, is a currency that allows you to “Impossify” your park attractions, shops and even staffs, changing their appearances into a more bizarre and logic-defying style that seems to attract more attention from the park visitors, on top of providing bonus stats.

Putting you into the shoes of a Visioneer at Cloudstormers Entertainment, your role in the campaign mode is to breathe new life into the abandoned theme parks under the company by completing various milestones depending on your dialogue choices with the main characters that you’ll eventually meet throughout the campaign.  These milestones include objectives such as “maintain Cleanliness at above 90%”, “have 850 visitors in the park at once”, and so on. During the campaign, you’ll also get the chance to select and complete Team Goals presented by these characters, resembling the side quests found in RPG games, which will reward you with money and Amazement. Introduced as part of the main milestones, there are sometimes challenges that you’ll have to complete, such as “open two flat rides on the ocean surface beside this island”. Funningly enough, you can simply demolish them after completing the challenges, making these challenges seem unnecessary, all the more so when they tend to disrupt your plans by having you to build something far from your main attractions. Aside of the boring challenges, I feel the main milestones serves as pretty decent objectives for you to learn as you play.

As a strategy game enthusiast, I find myself eagerly anticipating the fun of keeping tabs on the resource numbers. During the initial stages of my playthrough, I must confess that I often bypass the laborious hours devoted to crafting the perfect coaster and instead plunge headfirst into management gameplay. Thankfully, this game has my back by offering a selection of pre-built coasters that can be swiftly deployed and set into motion. And let's not forget the Flat Rides that requires minimal effort to open and operate, saving players like me a lot of trouble.

In my opinion, a well-designed management/strategy game should offer comprehensive information and control on how various gameplay systems could interact with each other, allowing players to strategically plan and execute their actions with full understanding of the game. However, even after investing over 20 hours into the game, I am still perplexed as to why some rides are consistently rejected by visitors, despite their seemingly ideal placement and maintenance status. Although there may be underlying gameplay mechanics contributing to this issue, the game fails to provide clear indications or explanations as to why some of my attractions (especially the roller coasters which never fail to generate losses every single month) would perform worse than others. Furthermore, I find it puzzling why the game doesn’t allow players to give direct commands to staffs, specifically janitors when it comes to cleaning a toilet that they consistently overlook (the best solution I found was to assign dedicated janitors solely responsible for cleaning toilets). The lack of information transparency and micromanagement kind of hampers the overall management experience, to be frank.

Although I think it's somewhat expected that any game that offers a high level of freedom would have its fair share of bugs, but it's still annoying when there's nothing you can do other than reloading a previous save. For instance, when the game fails to detect that you have already completed one of the objectives. While it’s understandable that these hard-to-discover bugs would sometimes be overlooked by the devs, it baffles me when there are bugs that are so omnipresent in which they’re impossible to miss during any stage of gameplay. I really don’t think one would miss the Shops and Rides List UI bug that would always takes you to a random shop when you click at the shop that you want to inspect. It’s kind of annoying when the game pops up a notification, seemingly saying “Hey, your Pizza Shop is making a loss for the past three months, why don’t you check it out?”, and when you pressed the notification, expecting it to take you directly to the shop, it takes you to a random toilet instead.

Despite leaving much to be desired as a management simulation game, I must admit that I still enjoyed the first few hours of gameplay in a Sandbox game. The larger maps provide ample room for customization, allowing players to set their own long-term objectives or even opt for an endless game. Unlike the Campaign mode, which offers a lackluster plot and time-limited milestones, the Sandbox mode offers a more relaxed experience in overall. However, the game's charm tends to fade quickly after the initial hours, as it lacks surprises and fails to offer new engaging elements. In my opinion, a valuable addition to future updates would be the inclusion of random events that require realistic management decisions, such as addressing a peculiar situation like visitors engaging in a fight with a clown or dealing with sudden breakdowns of machines that demand quick on-the-spot problem-solving.

Overall, Park Beyond is a good roller coaster building game hindered by its buggy experience and sub-par management gameplay. Even though it shows promise as a roller coaster builder, offering intricate details and creative freedom in constructing coasters, it may disappoint those seeking a good management simulation experience. If you're primarily interested in creating your dream roller coaster, I would suggest holding off on grabbing the game until the devs have addressed the bugs after a few more updates and patches.

And that concludes Lluvia’s review of the theme park management game Park Beyond.