Hello lovers of ducks and giant golden towers, WoodReviewer here. Today it is time for a review that is a few days late but that everyone has been waiting for: Them Park Tycoon 2 Beta by Den_S. More specifically, version 57, since Den_S actually understands why version numbers are important rather than saying a game is in Beta. Now this review is a bit late since this game peaked in popularity a few months ago, and honestly I have no reason why this review was not made a month ago. However today is today, and it is time to review it. Lets start off with my giant tower of uselessness.

Now some of you may be wondering why I have a giant tower lined with expensive statues and paved with expensive golden floors. I forget. I’m sure I had a plan, but I forgot what it was since I built the building and now.

Some of you are also probably wondering why my park is filled with dozens of topple towers. This was due to and old glitch where guests would ignore all but the most exciting rides. Because topple towers were the most exciting rides, I spammed them since that was all guests would ride. This problem seems to have been fixed in the last month or so, though, but I did not feel like remaking my entire park.

Of course in the month or so since I last played the game, much of it has been updated mechanically. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the wood grain. Lets start with the basics of the paths, like this wooden plank path. As you can see, the end does not have vertical wood grain to connect with the plank lines on top.

For those who are confused by this, this is what the texture should look like.

Keeping up the theme of wooden planks being bad, this chest had improper wood grain. Well, maybe  not improper but weird. The chest is clearly a union, but the issue here is that on top some planks wrap around, while others go across the chest. Structurally, the going across planks are the strongest, but my issue is that the method isn’t consistent more than it is incorrect.

This issue is fixable with some CSG trickery, and it should be fixed.

But enough with wooden planks; lets move onto wood grain. Starting off is this land sale sign. The obvious issue here is that the post on the bottom has bad wood grain, which will cause the post to easily snap. If this is two parts, the simple fix is to flip the bottom piece. If it is a union, the fix is to separate the two parts because it is impossible to have the post and sign be correct in a union.

Speaking of separating unions that have bad wood grain, this fence section has bad wood grain on the cross sections. For both pieces the wood grain should go from one corner of the frame to the other. Instead the wood grain goes from one side to the other on the front, and side to side on the top. This is bad.

This is also true on larger fence pieces and various other cross-sectional  supports.

Moving onto smaller issues, one side of this picnic table’s legs is bad. Or one corner. Mainly the front one on the left side of the image. All the others are correct, so I’m not sure why that one is bad.

And on this picnic cable with chairs, the beck of the chairs are bad, with horizontal wood grain rather than wood grain rather than vertical.

Moving onto smaller issues, the top of the horizontal supports and sides of some of the boards have incorrect wood grain. For the supports the grain should stretch from one vertical post to the other, while for the boards should have vertical wood grain on all four sides.

Last up, in a case of extremely small details, the sides of the boards on this trash can are incorrect. Not the front faves, but the thing sides that go perpendicular to the can. This is a small detail, but still a detail that should be fixed.

Unlike most games where the amount of bad wood grain is set in stone, in Theme Park Tycoon it is up to the player as to how much they have. They can have no wood grain by ignoring wooden parts, or a lot of bad wood grain if they use a lot of wooden parts. But it shouldn’t be up to the player to have to chose if they want to have no bad wood grain or use wood grain, in a similar way that people shouldn’t have to choose between not playing a bad roller coaster game or playing Roller Coaster Tycoon World. Ultimately, there are only a few assets that need to be fixed amount the dozens of assets in-game, and I hope that soon enough they are fixed so that players can have proper wood grain.