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Park Beyond’s tools make it easy to craft hilariously dangerous rollercoastersDon’t worry madam, impossification is completely safe
Don’t worry madam, impossification is completely safe
Park Beyond, an upcoming theme park management sim in the vein of a juiced up Rollercoaster Tycoon, is trying to balance two slightly opposed teams in its target audience. There are people who love doing the management bits - the bean-counting, optimising the amount of salt on fries to make people thirsty and buy more drinks, paying close attention to demographics and average spends and that sort of kidney*. Then there are people who want to design a park full of cool-ass rides and different themed zones, a true magical wonderland.Insidethis Park Beyond are two wolves, in other words, and each needs a different but equally robust set of tools to wrangle.
After some hands on with an early build of Park Beyond, I have a little more faith that Limbic Entertainment are going to be able to pull it off. The toolset for building a rollercoast is, in particular, impressive. It’s never been so easy to make a ride that breaks both the laws of physics and the laws of health and saftey. The coasters in this game are an absolute menace. In a good way.
Park Beyond - Announcement TrailerWatch on YouTube
Park Beyond - Announcement Trailer
The Gamescom demo build - which, in the spirit of Park Beyond’s “impossification” concept of making the impossible reality, I played despite being hundreds of miles from Cologne - was the first level of the game, introducing you to coaster building. It’s a good choice to demo, because it combines the “aw, man, cool!” instinct that rollercoasters tend to arouse in people, with an indication of how deep you can go with some of the systems. You can press different buttons to change the height, yaw, roll and pitch (or, as I would put it before playing the demo and learning these concepts, make the track all bendy and go sideways!) of indididual sections of the track, both as you place a new section for the first time, or afterwards if you want to fine-tune things.
It also introduces the impossification idea very neatly. For every ride you can unlock upgrades to impossify them, which in real life would make them incredibly dangerous and result in thousands of lawsuits every year, but in the game just makes them more awesomer. For the rollercoaster you get modules to add to the track, and there are apparently loads of weird ones. In the demo there were only two: the ramp, which attaches a glider to your carts and wafts them across a gap; and the cannon. Guess what that does?
But you can’t just whap in whatever you fancy without thought to the larger physics of the coaster. The cannon speeds up your carts, so they’re good to place near the bottom of an incline, so you can shoot the carts up there without having to use a chain lift on your track that kind of slows everything down. The ramp, on the other hand, needs velocity going into it, cos it slows down as it goes, so it’s good after a big dip. Your rollercoaster, no matter how many loop-de-loops or undeground tunnels you put it through, still has to work, in other words. The cart has to get from one end to the other, and if it doesn’t you have to work out why; it’s probably losing too much speed somewhere so you need to change the track a small bit. Fortunately both identifying and fixing the problem are easy to do, because of those robust building tools. We’re treading that line between the numbers and the fun.
I also got access to a sandbox mode (a slightly unstable one this early on, but the issues were known so we’ll allow it). I was able to make a decent fist of placing a food and drink stand, a pirate ship swing and one of those octopus up-and-down rides, and then built a rollercoaster that went all around my little park. There are similar tools for creating curved paths and queues, and I loved filling the place with giant toffee apple decorations and trees with pink foliage. It’s a very natural kind of design process and even without a gradual tutorial it was easy to figure enough things out that I was placing all the buildings and rubbish bins I needed. It' gets more complicated if you decide to start making buildings out of modular bits. There’s a menu that just has all the parts of all the shops and themes you’ve unlocked. I had a go at it and was capable only of making the sort of monstrosity that would beg for death if it could speak, but I think people will spend a lot of time with Park Beyond paused while they’re tinkering.
This is not my park, mine was nowhere near as competent as this one
