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Have you ever dreamed of becoming a park ranger, responsible for a huge national park filled with wildlife, campsites, hiking trails, and everything the wilderness has to offer? If so, you now have the chance to experience a slice of that life (virtually, at least) in Ranger's Path: National Park Simulator, a game that places you in charge of a sprawling natural reserve where, step by step, you’ll learn the ins and outs of a ranger’s daily duties.
You'll start this simulator as a rookie ranger, fresh out of school, who is very eager to prove himself in this job, but as dull and simple as being a ranger might seem, doing this job is anything but easy, and you'll experience it all in this game.
First, you'll have a chance to create your character in a not-so-robust and detailed character creator, where you'll have a chance to choose between several preset characters, male and female alike, put on the ranger uniform, and immediately start with your very responsible job.
The national park you work in is quite huge, and you'll have to tend to it whole, without any help; everything inside will rest on your inexperienced shoulders. At the beginning, you'll have help in the form of a radio tutorial in which the game will teach you some basics on how to repair signs and trails, how to check permits from the visitors (and issue the tickets if there are any problems), and the other usual ranger stuff.
The game is played in third person, and you'll control your character in this perspective on foot and in a vehicle. I already mentioned that the park is quite big, so walking around is simply not an option. You'll have your pickup truck to help you navigate the park and arrive at destinations more quickly and more efficiently.
Doing daily tasks like repairing stuff and doing usual checks will give you XP, and more XP gained will make you a more experienced ranger capable of doing more responsible tasks. The gameplay loop mostly revolves around that.
You'll have a lot of tools at your disposal, and using each of them will have its own dedicated mini-game involving some small quick-time events. You'll use the usual repairing tools like a hammer, a saw, a screwdriver, an axe, a paint tool, and many more. Each repair will require different tools, and sometimes multiple tools, and since the park is quite big, there will always be something to tend to, making you busy all the time.
Once the night falls, your shift will be over, and you'll be prompted to end the day by going to your hut and resting. A new day is a new opportunity, and new tasks await, just like in real life, right?
Apart from the usual repairing stuff, you'll take care of flora and fauna inside the park as well, or more like catalogue them properly. Every time you get close to an animal or new flora, the game will warn you, and you'll be able to employ one more of your tools, the camera. You'll use the camera to take pictures of the park, mostly animals and herbs, which will fill up entries in your lexicon; something similar to the flora and fauna cataloguing in Red Dead Redemption 2, but way less sophisticated, I must note.
The animals in Ranger’s Path National Park Simulator usually behave like the animals and will usually run once you approach them, so you'll need to be extra careful when trying to take pictures of them. However, some very dangerous predators, like bears or wolves, will run even when they shouldn't, because it is just normal for those animals to attack people, but perhaps due to the lack of any health system in this game, it was easier to make them behave like the rest of the skittish animals – a bit inconsistent, but it is what it is.
One more problem with the game that simply didn't sit well with me, and many players will see it as the problem, I'm sure of it, is quite bad performance on the PC. Ranger’s Path National Park Simulator is a decent-looking game, but no more than that. It runs on Unreal Engine, and some scenes can be quite demanding, especially when there is a lot happening on the screen, but on my PC, which is quite strong (you can see the specifications at the beginning of the review), no matter the settings, I constantly kept getting just 30 FPS.
After tampering with the settings for a bit, I discovered that the only option to make the game run decently at 40+ FPS is to downscale the resolution below the performance level. For example, ray tracing, whether on or off, doesn't affect performance at all, but the resolution upscaling kills it. I say again, Ranger’s Path National Park Simulator is far from a perfect-looking game to induce such visual problems.
Apart from those performance issues, the game looks quite nice, or to be more precise, the park and the depiction of the nature, including forests, rivers, and meadows, look quite nice, while the characters, along with their quite dull-looking face models, look like they're made for the old generation of consoles. This is yet another inconsistency I noticed in Ranger’s Path National Park Simulator.
Conclusion
Ranger’s Path National Park Simulator can be quite an engaging game with a very contagious gameplay loop; once you start roaming the vastness of Faremont National Park, there is no end to it – you'll always have one more task to do and one more lexicon entry to fulfil.
However, doing all this will sooner rather than later turn to boredom, and it is a million-dollar question for how long Ranger’s Path National Park Simulator will be capable of holding your attention. If I had to guess, not very long, but who knows, maybe you like tending to the virtual national park more than the next guy.
The Good
Relaxing and immersive national park setting- Large open park to explore
- Satisfying task-based gameplay loop
- Flora and fauna cataloguing system
- Vehicle traversal across the park
The Bad
Poor PC performance and optimization- Repetitive gameplay over time
- Outdated character models
- Limited gameplay depth
