At a glance...

Thrillville: Off the Rails review

I think that this is going to be my first review where I'm going to give my final comments at the start. Now I'm sure most of you who are reading this are probably wondering why. Well, it's simple; this game is just not good. In fact, I'm going to come out and say it; don't buy this game. Instead, if you're looking for a decent rollercoaster design game, buy RollerCoaster Tycoon 3. See what a nice guy I am, I even put a link to Amazon for you to go and buy it. But, I suppose some of you actually want the mini-games that come with Thrillville: OTR, and well my friends, here you go, all the free game you'll need, and some of them are better than most of the ones you'll find in Thrillville itself.

So, there you have it, go and buy RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, it's not like you're giving your money to another developer now is it... Oh. What?! You're still here? Right then, looks like I'll have to actually do some real work here, and seeing as you asked so nicely, I'll start by listing what is good with the game when compared to RCT3.

The pros: You can finally play the sideshows you put into your park, and can now drive those go-karts around your crazy tracks! Ok, that's all, moving on then... The cons: You can only put rides in certain locations, no emphasis on park management, no need to actually care about the park in any manner, hell, you go without even hiring a mechanic, and everything would still be hunky dory. I mean, come on, even Bullfrog's classic Theme Park had a better park management system, and for that matter a better park designing feature. You have to play rather bad mini-games in order to up your status, in fact, you could probably complete the game without actually designing a feasible rollercoaster. Blaspheme!

When we received Thrillville here at AAG, I actually said, "Thrillville, hmm, you know what, I actually want to review that". I mean, it's made by Frontier, the guys who made RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 and, well, let's just say I'm a three-times-daily visitor of "screamscape.com", the regularly updated theme park news and rumours website. So, now you can see that when I popped in Thrillville and found out that not only couldn't I make my own park, with whatever rides, shows, and fireworks displays I wanted, as in RCT3, I was slightly disappointed. But I pushed on anyway, thinking maybe all the other stuff will make up for it.

Well, starting up the game, you're presented with the most annoying song known to man. It's worse than hearing "It's tricky, tricky, tricky" (from SSX Tricky) or "It's DK, Donkey Kong" (from DK64), and if that couldn't get any worse, think again. You are then treated to design your player, and a few setting up screens of what is essentially rather pointless crap, all to said music. Don't worry because after that you're treated to some strange FMV sequences of a robot and an insane person. These actually are what kept me going in the game, and while they might only be a few minutes long in total, they are actually quite funny and well directed.

So, after surviving the torture of the main menu music, you're free to play 5 tutorials-worth of boredom and confusion. It also tells you how to play the mini-game on a screen but not in the tutorial text before the mini game itself leading to cries of "What am I meant to do??!" every time. That leads me to the mini-games themselves; there were actually a couple I enjoyed, including one where you get to do some trampolining, and you can control nearly everything about the jump. On a separate note, it is probably a good thing there's no blood in the game, as I'm sure there would be someone with a few bones sticking out. Leading on from that is the coaster design. Obviously it makes logical sense to lead onto the coaster design from people with broken bones; well, sort of anyway. You see, for some reason, Thrillville in some cases actually rewards you for not building a working ride. In fact, in one case it was your objective; to build a rollercoaster that crashed deliberately in order to destroy some robots, because suposedly robots are stupid and will go on anything. And, of course, you also get guests going on said ride, though they must be demi-gods or something. Relatedly, one of the other things you're meant to do in the game is talk to park guests, and one of them even said, "we just rode the rollercoaster, it was amazing when it crashed". Er...whatever you say demi-god...

The design system for creating amazing crashing rides is, well, not the greatest to say the least. I mean, it's basically the same as the system used in RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, just they've tried to adjust it so that you don't have a huge menu pop-up with a ton of information. To be honest, I would have preferred the menu pop-up as it's far more useful, though possibly not practical on the consoles. In addition to all the standard track pieces you would get on normal rides, Thrillville adds some that are just not possible in real life. I would, however, rather only have real pieces personally, so again I'm going to stick to RCT3. In addition, if you really want, you can even let your friends on Xbox Live ride your obscene creation - not that we could find anyone on our lists sharing tracks.

Moving onto the mini-games. Some turned out to be good, but some were also very bad, with most simply bad. I think the thing is, most of the mini-games feel rushed, and the controls seem to be as if they were worked on until they did what they were designed to do, and nothing more. I do, however, feel that the mini-golf is actually reasonably enjoyable as you do get to play on your own designed courses, though it will take a few holes to get used to how the power gauge works. You can even play them all in multiplayer to show off how poor they are to your friends, though this feels very much tacked-on to most of these games, especially since they are all offline. That said, competition may have been difficult to find online anyway. It's also worth noting that there is an FPS mini-game for you to play though that plays about as well as any N64 shoot-'em-up that wasn't Golden Eye or Perfect Dark (i.e. very good), and it looks about as good as games for that era as well.

Ratings

Click here to buy Thrillville: Off the Rails from Amazon.co.uk.

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