With games like Roller Coaster Tycoon, Theme Park, and later Thrillville, the 90s and early 00s were a great time for fans of amusement park simulators. Unfortunately, the genre kind of dried up, but soon Limfik Entertainment intends to change that with Park Beyond. To mark the occasion, publisher Bandai Namco invited us to try the game at Europa-Park, a true theme park in southern Germany, near the borders of France and Switzerland.
Strolling the bustling streets of Europa Park got me thinking why the genre is fading away. There could be many reasons, but one of them is definitely that despite the advancements in graphics, few games in recent years have been able to capture the vibe of a real theme park. As a result, you often feel a little detached, like you are some kind of worker in a fun ministry designed to make people happy without sharing your own happiness.
Here is an ad:
If you look around the park, you’ll find all the basic rides that sell fantasy to those who go up. In Beyond the Park, we wanted to make that fantasy a reality.
I understand that the more abstract aspects are also part of the appeal. After all, these are management games, and in Park Beyond, you still get a lot of advanced features to tweak and tune. However, developer Limmic Entertainment has apparently tried to amplify the ambience by taking advantage of the special perks you get by running a digital amusement park compared to a real amusement park – mostly safety is no longer a factor, and the laws of physics, while still somewhat applicable, But more forgiving than real life.
“In Beyond Parks, designing a theme park is at the heart of the experience. But we wanted to add something on top of that. We introduce players to the ‘impossible’ of rides,”Producer Marco Huppertz explains, while directing our attention to the surrounding attractions on the busy square of Europa Park.“So, if you look around the park, you’ll find all the basic rides that sell fantasy to people who go up. With Park Beyond, we want to make that fantasy a reality and impose rides that you can’t experience in real life. s things.
Here is an ad:
While playing the game, I found the results of this imposition to be very varied. On a water slide, you might encounter a real Kraken, or on a roller coaster, the cart might be hit by an actual cannon. The feature also extends to employees who, when imposed, may use a plethora of advanced gadgets to turn their mundane tasks into entertainment. It’s by no means groundbreaking, but it does breathe a lot of life into a somewhat generic art style, with very bright colors and cartoon characters that look intimidating on the outside.
While imposing is still at the heart of the game’s atmosphere, it wasn’t the main focus of the actual preview, and I played two missions and screwed up in sandbox mode. After building a giant roller coaster in the first mission, I was thrown right into building my own park from scratch. It started out easy because I built flat rides like a ferris wheel and a carousel and then laid paths in between. Placement is easy to handle, with great precision in adjusting rotation and exact position.
For roller coasters or any other attraction, you need to think about the guests first.
After laying the groundwork I was ready to open the park but unfortunately the guests brought many problems and I scrambled to build benches, toilets and food stalls while hiring four or five sanitation workers as I was targeting mainly teenagers Spectators seemed unable or unwilling to use the trash cans I placed every step of the park. Beneath the crazy and colorful surface lies a series of mundane problems that must be addressed, and the analogy book might have a live day with advanced features such as heat maps showing possible improvements and the possibility to adjust the price of individual items in the store.
I’m here mostly for the roller coaster though.Obviously that’s also how you approach the challenge of building a real roller coaster, which I later learned while talking to Mathis Gullon, project manager at construction firm Mach NeXT: “For a roller coaster or any other attraction, you need to think about the tenants first. What do you want them to do, what do you want them to feel. Then you need to check how much space you have available, and of course what budget, and then you can Use it for a design. But really, it’s the guests, the space, the budget.
Since this is only the second mission, budget isn’t really an issue (although later missions will be more challenging), and I have little chance of running out of space. The audience was the only real concern for me at the time, and I decided to do some crazy falls and crazy turns to keep bored teens from falling asleep. Unlike Roller Coaster Tycoon, you can’t let your guests take a fishless ride and sit back and wait for the chaos. It’s a German game after all, and safety checks are mandatory before opening any of the rides. Also, you have to take into account factors like speed and momentum, which can be controlled with special track sections that can pull, slow or assist the cart around corners.
This may sound like limiting your options, but it isn’t, and it became very apparent when I looked at the player on the screen next to me. While my coaster was somewhat safe and gentle despite my ambitions, her coaster was really crazy, rising a few hundred meters into the sky, only to be supported by what looked like long-root spaghetti because the algorithm was obviously hard to do This ridiculously tall build automatically generates support beams. After a painfully slow climb to the blue sky, a sudden fall, then a real vomit, inducing a vortex of crazy twists and turns, for some reason I can’t fathom, still finally passed security and got the guest’s approve. In short, you can build some truly unique rides, and we’ve only been able to try a small selection of the many tools during this preview.
These impossible capabilities, the surprising amount of management and customization options, and, just as importantly, the tools to build the coaster. All of this seems very promising. But, having played this game at Europa Park, it’s hard not to compare the game to the real deal.
The park is a huge wonderland of different styles, with 18 themed areas, most of which are based on European countries. By contrast, Park Beyond has five different themes, many of which are pretty generic, like Westerns or Candy Land, which I tried during preview.
Maybe this is an unfair comparison. Europa Park has been slowly expanding for fifty years, and Limbic Entertainment only finished production on their last game, Tropico 6, three years ago. Hopefully the last few months of development will further refine an already solid feature, and when they’re finally ready to show off the full game, the remaining themes and all the impossible rides will lead to a theme park simulator, since a decade or two The theme park simulator we’ve all been craving since the competition ran out of steam years ago.