Park Beyond: If you finally want to build your very own amusement park

“Ha,” you might be thinking, “I already managed the craziest attractions in Theme Park before I constructed crazy roller coasters with RollerCoaster Tycoon and its more or less close spiritual relatives!” And that’s true, too. But you have never had such powerful tools in your hands in any major amusement park manager as Limbic Entertainment (Tropico 6) puts in your hands with Park Beyond.

You are not dependent on ready-made shops and attractions here, but can stack the stalls on top of each other as you wish, design completely new ones from individual elements and freely change existing copies accordingly. You can share the results with other online players or use their creations if you need a creative break.

Park Beyond trumps most, how could it be otherwise, when creating the actual attractions: the roller coasters. Because you also have free choice with them – if not only when putting the individual parts together. As usual, you first click on the end of the rail section that you want to connect to, in order to then drag the next section as far and as high as you want it to be, or even through a newly created tunnel.

And that’s not all, because now you can also rotate this section of the track freely around its own axis, place it at any angle in the curve and even give it a gradient to perhaps introduce an incline for the following section. It may be that these rotations are not completely arbitrary, but take place in steps of five degrees each. But you can build with it as you like, which I had a lot of fun with in the tutorial that was playable at gamescom.

There I also had to decide if I wanted additional track pieces like ramps or cannons to catapult the passages of my ghost…er, roller coaster through a giant donut, a construction site, or other elements of the park. There will be more such exotic adrenaline boosters later, which is why you can also control the speed at which the wagons roll over certain sections of the track. After all, it is absolutely necessary to avoid the train stopping halfway up the mountain.

The question remains, what kind of park do you actually want to build, and here, too, Limbic has come up with something interesting. You decide for yourself which goals you actually want to achieve, for example whether the park should attract adults, families or children. After all, you play an architect who is supposed to bring the financially ailing business into shape and is given the help of various consultants.

You then see them discussing the future of the facility in team meetings, whereupon you decide on one of the variants. This cinematic staging could be an entertaining element of the campaign – although of course there is also a sandbox mode in which you are only concerned with the park itself from the ground up.

What this economic simulation is all about, i.e. how convincingly the administration of admission prices and staff is involved, and how much you can ultimately influence the general orientation of the park with strategic decisions, I can’t say anything about that at the moment.

The only thing that is clear to me is that the enormous possibilities in building the roller coasters actually represent a big step forward and could herald a new generation of roller coaster simulations, at least on the technical side. Because you’ve never experienced that in any theme park before!