Developed by To-Go Games and published by astragon Entertainment, Ranger’s Path: National Park Simulator is a park ranger simulation game. At this point, astragon Entertainment has established itself as one of the best simulation game publishers in the market, with a strong portfolio of unique simulators. Its latest release, Ranger’s Path: National Park Simulator, is yet another feature in its cap that takes players to a gorgeous national park and entrusts its care into their hands. In our review of the Early Access PC Steam release of Ranger’s Path: National Park Simulator, we put on our park ranger hat and ensure that the park runs flawlessly.
Ranger’s Path: National Park Simulator is set in the gorgeous Faremont National Park. This huge national park is filled with a diverse landscape, complete with its own unique flora and fauna. You step into the game as a young ranger recruit who is at the start of a promising career. The game begins with a generic character creator where you can choose your gender and one of three available faces. After completing a brief tutorial, you are set loose on the national park with narrative-driven progression. While you are free to explore and complete basic tasks, the game does offer a proper narrative with missions that introduce you to different elements of the gameplay.
The basic gameplay loop revolves around you exploring different trails and fixing everything that is broken. Your duty revolves around picking up trash, guiding and helping visitors, checking their permits, and protecting the local flora and fauna. While exploring the trails, you will be surprised by how much of the national park is initially blocked off, with trails locked due to pending maintenance work. There are broken directional signs, logs blocking paths, trash cans tipped over, and much more. To fix these issues, you can select different tools from a dial menu that range from a hammer, screwdriver, paint, to a litter picker, and use them to fix the problems.
Each tool comes with a small mini game, which must be completed as accurately as possible to quickly complete that particular task. For example, for the screwdriver, you must rotate the mouse in a circular motion. The hammer requires perfectly timed smashes with a sphere rotating in an eight-figure. The Saw requires you to move the mouse up and down, while for the litter picker, you have to move around and press E to pick up the litter and then empty the garbage bag into trash cans. These mini games are pretty addictive, and they can easily distract you from the main missions.
There were many instances where I was trying to complete a main mission, but I kept delaying it because I continued to run into smaller things like fixing signboards or picking up trash. It is very easy to get distracted while exploring the beautiful Faremont National Park. Throughout the day, you also continue to receive callouts, which are smaller tasks like finding a lost hiker or taking a picture of a specific animal. These are timed, and you only have that day to complete these callouts. The game features a day and night cycle with dynamic weather. During nighttime, you must go back to your hut and sleep. The dynamic weather is amazing, and the different weather effects like heavy rain, look and sound very realistic. Exploration also unlocks many points-of-interest on your map.
The NPCs interact with you and your surroundings, as they will stop you and ask for directions. If something is broken, they will express their anger, and if something is fixed, they will show their gratitude. In different sections of the park, you can interact with the guests and see their permits to check if they have access to that particular activity or not. If you see a trespasser, you can issue fines or kick them out. You also have a special Ranger’s Vision, which allows you to highlight any interactable items on your screen, like broken signs or fixtures, flora, or hidden fauna in the bushes. You can use your camera to take pictures, and if you manage to complete an animal’s section in your Lexicon, you can place their models down at the museum in the Visitor’s Center.
There are a lot of things to like about Ranger’s Path: National Park Simulator. Its world does not feel empty, as there are plenty of people moving around on trails, and then you also have wildlife. The visuals are just gorgeous, and you can easily see the power of Unreal Engine making everything look beautiful. The landscapes, shadows, and small details are excellently created, which gives an aesthetic look to the game. The driving mechanics are decent, and the gameplay is free of bugs, too. For some reason, you are unable to pause the game. While it is not something that really matters in a game like this, since the time passes quickly, being unable to pause the game means that if you are AFK, the in-game timer keeps rolling.
There are a few issues with the current build of Ranger’s Path: National Park Simulator. Some of these are related to the game’s performance, while some of them are related to the game’s design. None of these are game-breaking, but they are worth mentioning in this review. The most obvious one is the game’s performance, which varies a lot due to in-game factors. In open-areas, the game offers good, balanced frames, but in high-activity areas or in places with a lot of shadows, the performance takes a massive hit. For me, the frames dipped to around 25 from the high 70s, even with a 4000 series GPU. This PC is able to run God of War Ragnarok in the high 80s, and for a game like Ranger’s Path: National Park Simulator to stutter this much shows that it lacks proper optimization currently.
Other issues with the build are different gameplay-related ones, which are more of inconsistencies than problems. While exploring different trails, you will notice that the whole trail is shiny and squeaky clean, but as soon as you find a garbage bin, there will be a lot of trash around it. It does not make any sense as to why people are littering around the bin and not on other parts of the trails where there is no access to a bin. In another instance, I spent around 10 minutes fixing everything on a trail, and as soon as I was done, I received a callout for repairing some fixtures, and the game had broken the things I had just repaired for that particular callout. There are also no Steam Cloud Saves, so if you want to jump into the game on another system, you cannot resume your progress from the first system on it.
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Final Verdict:
Ranger’s Path: National Park Simulator is off to a great start in its Early Access phase. The current launch is a solid foundation to start building something great. It offers a beautiful, wide-open map with plenty of activity and tasks to complete. Offering soothing, low-paced gameplay, Ranger’s Path: National Park Simulator is great for players who want to jump into a simulation experience that keeps them close to gorgeous green landscapes and animals. While the ranger duties are somewhat limited as of now, it will be interesting to see what the developers add further in the game further down the road. There are a few performance hiccups as of now which may cause issues for players with low-end PCs. If you always wanted to be a park ranger and couldn’t in real life, Ranger’s Path: National Park Simulator offers a virtual alternative to your dream.
Final Score: 8.0/10
Disclaimer: An Early Access review code for Ranger’s Path: National Park Simulator was provided by HomeRun PR on behalf of astragon Entertainment for this review. Read our Review Policy.
