Park Beyond Review (PS5) | Push Square

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At its heart, Park Beyond evokes memories of the Theme Park games from a couple of decades ago, and it's perhaps due to our nostalgia for those titles that we enjoyed our time with this as much as we did. There's something to be said for the simplified theme park builder, in which you don't need to worry about navigating a dozen overwhelming menus or whether your rollercoasters adhere to the laws of conventional physics.

Park Beyond has that appeal, and while we do like the relative complexity of something like Planet Coaster, sometimes you just want to make a rollercoaster that can go underwater or shoots the train across a ravine using a giant cannon. That said, there's too many problems here to ignore, and while patches and future updates might remedy the most egregious issues that plague the game in its current state, we can only review what's in front of us, and what's in front of us is a mess.

When it comes to actually building your park, it's mostly a simple process. You have access to a few rides at the beginning like the classic pirate ship, and once you've set one down you plan out where your visitors will queue up to get on it, and where they'll exit. You've got a couple of shops and other amenities, and you connect the whole thing up with paths that you draw out.

Building rollercoasters is a little more involved, but it's quite forgiving. You connect various pieces of track together and some special pieces like loops or corkscrews. As you build, a simulation runs showing a phantom train travelling the track you've built and it will highlight any issues like if your track is at a sharp angle that will cause the train to derail, or if the track is colliding with anything like a wall or the sea.

Once you've