In what is possibly the most niche video game of all time, Parking World allows you to fulfil your carpark management dreams… if you can put up with the technical issues.
Anyone who drives has complained about a carpark at some point. I have, and I know I’m right when I point out that our local retail park’s one is dreadful and needs remodelling. Thankfully, Parking World has come along and now I can prove that I’m better at making a carpark than actual carpark planners. It turns out, however, that I’m not that good at it.
In Parking World you do exactly what you might expect. Design, construct, and manage a profitable car park in a given space using the tools at your disposal. There is a plot of sorts as you go through the seven scenarios that teach you the general mechanics of the game, but it’s literally the smallest amount of window dressing imaginable. Parking World is mechanics driven, as you’d expect a management game to be.
I say “teach” with regards to the scenarios, but I very much felt like they give you the absolute basics and expect you to work out the rest for yourself. They’ll tell you that you can use ramps to add additional floors to your carpark, but not how they connect to other tiles on previous floors. You’ll be informed that staff can fix damage to your carpark, but not that you need to ensure your Materials resource is high enough for them to do so. There were plenty of moments where I had to figure out how things worked together rather than the game teaching me.
Still, once you have an idea on how to get everything working, this can be quite fun to mess around with. You start by laying out a ground floor using foundations on which you can put parking spaces. That’s not enough though, as cars need to be directed around the carpark and to the exit, so you’ll also have to place arrows to tell traffic where to go. This means you’ll need to think carefully about how to maximise the room you have to get the most parking spaces you can. I quite liked the little puzzle element of this as I tried to increase efficiency as much as possible.
Generally, it seems sensible to create a ground floor to earn enough money to expand upwards, and this is where things can get a bit tricky, as you really need to think carefully about ramp placement. They can really eat into the room you have if you don’t plan for a careful route. Additionally, you want stairs for drivers to get between floors. Sure, they can walk on those ramps, but that causes traffic to slow right down, losing you money and rating. Yes, your carpark has a rating, and you’ll get fewer customers if it’s low.
Staff are also needed to maintain the area, to keep your rating from dropping, however, you can do this manually by going into first person mode and holding E over damaged areas if you want. You’ll end up doing this quite a bit unless you hire loads of staff as they don’t seem to be terribly quick at getting to what needs to be done.
It’s possible to raise your rating through adding amenities though. Things like vending machines, EV charging points, and toilets raise your standing, as do environmental features such as plants and fountains. All this stuff needs to be connected up and maintained though. If you want EV chargers, you’ll need to connect it up to the power network using a generator — either the mains network or environmentally friendly options which is a nice inclusion — and wires. Toilets need a water source, so you’d best sort out pipes for them. I like the amount of crunchy management there is in this element of Parking World.
On the surface, Parking World does an alright job of letting you mess around with building a carpark, and if you’re someone who wants to get the aesthetics just right, there’s a lot to love. You’ll wire pipes through walls, set up load-bearing pillars, put lighting in all the right places, which is all great. But the thing is you don’t actually need to do any of this. Pipes will just clip through walls, removing the requirement to add a through-pipe. Wires can go wherever you want, and floors don’t actually have to be held up by anything other than thoughts and prayers. This isn’t really a sim as much as it is a sandbox or a Lego set, and once I figured that out I was a little disappointed. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice cosy game with no threat, but it wasn’t as well thought out as I imagined.
What was really frustrating though was the performance. This game does not run well. It’s not visually stunning by any stretch, but once I got to the point of having a second floor to my carpark, the framerate started to plummet. My PC isn’t the most modern, but it runs the likes of the gorgeous Clair Obscure on high at a buttery 120 frames per second, whilst Parking World was struggling to hit 30 at times. I suspect it has something to do with the number of paths the game is trying to manage, but when I see comments in the forums with people on far more powerful computers than mine complaining about performance, then I think there may be greater issues. Credit where it’s due though, the devs are active on those forums, trying to put out patches to resolve this. As it stands though, it’s very irritating.
Parking World is probably the best carpark building and management game there is, but that isn’t exactly a large pool to pick from. It’s fine enough if you can overlook the performance and occasional bugs, and if you’re willing to make a beautiful carpark by using all the fancy, but ultimately unnecessary features, then you’ll probably have a good time. As a management game, it’s fairly bare bones though.
Parking World is available now on PC.
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