Thrillville: Off the Rails Review
Overview
I bought this game hoping to get a console equivalent of Rollercoaster Tycoon, the quintessential amusement park simulator. While Thrillville is not as good in many respects, the 50 mini games included on the disc make the purchase more than worthwhile.
Rollercoaster Construction
Undoubtedly the most fun part of an amusement park simulator should be its rollercoasters. Thrillville borrows heavily from RC Tycoon's style of building rollercoasters, but the style is far more carefree, surrendering a lot of the strategy and satisfaction involved in RC Tycoon. Whereas RC Tycoon forced you to plan carefully and consider physics and intensity, Thrillville encourages you to just go for it, ignoring physics and gravity entirely, and still providing a steady stream of enthusiastic riders even when you provide drops and turns so intense that they'd kill most real people. The Wii remote interface further encourages this approach with its loose, fluid control style. It's a little tricky to get the track to do exactly what you're planning, but if you just let go and start clicking away, the track almost seems to develop a mind of its own, coming up with crazy drops, rises, and turns in response to every little movement of the hand, leaving you with something pretty fun that you really hadn't been planning. One nice bonus that Thrillville provides here which RC Tycoon really should have is an option to have the game finish the track for you. In RC Tycoon, you could spend an hour trying to find a way to connect what you'd been building back to the original starting track at the end. Thrillville can do it for you with the touch of a button. All in all, Thrillville's ride construction is still fun, but it lacks the strategy and planning of RC Tycoon, creating something simpler and mindless.
PARK MANAGEMENT
In RC TYCOON, you could control every aspect of your park, from where you placed your rides to the color and style of a flower bed that you chose to install. Thrillville offers significantly less freedom, giving you absolutely no control over park layout or appearances, and designating specific areas where you can clumsily install shops and stalls and other specific areas where you can build Roller Coasters. It doesn't really allow you to be creative or give the park any personality beyond what the game designers gave it. It also severely limits the amount of Roller Coasters you can build (and no, you can't have two coasters intertwining or anywhere near each other for that matter). This aspect of the game is a tremendous disappointment.
STAFF
Whereas RC Tycoon prompted you to use real strategy in deciding how many janitors, engineers, and entertainers to hire and what routes to give them, Thrillville measures the staff's effectiveness in terms of how well you can "train" them by playing simple mini games that mimic the most simplified aspects of their jobs. Again, less strategy and creativity, but it's easier and mindless.
INTERACTION
One of the game's more ambitious efforts is to give you an actual character in the park, representing you, which can ride rides, play games, and interact with guests. It's a great idea, but the end results are limited. You don't have all that much freedom in designing the look of your character, and you have even less freedom when talking with guests. Possible topics of conversation are made available to you or disappear with no apparent rhyme or reason, ultimately leaving you with no better option than to tell a guest that you like cold pizza because the "How are you?" and "matchmaker" options have both inconveniently vanished. Personally, I'd like to be able to mess with my guests. Sometimes the game will allow you to act disappointed that a little kid doesn't know who you are and then pretend that you've been his best friend for years (which inevitably creeps him out), but then the game only leaves you with kind conversation topics to choose from when you were hoping to see the conversation go down in flames. Finally, while being able to move around the park and ride the rides as a person is a refreshing change, there is no option to view them from omniscient mode. In RC Tycoon, you could watch from a distance and see all your rides operating at once, watching traffic flow, and enjoying the multitude of stories taking place in the park you built. In Thrillville, it's one small area at a time.
Mini Games
Even if everything I've written thus far has turned you off to this game, the mini games alone make this game worth trying. The game contains 50 mini games (though some are only variations of other mini games) which can be accessed either by installing and playing them in your park or by choosing party mode from the main menu, which allows up to four players to take on their choice of mini games (assuming you have four remotes and nunchuks). I'm not generally a fan of mini games, and I've played my share of awful cheap-o mini game compilations for the Wii, but many of the mini games in Thrillville are downright awesome. For one thing, many of the mini games are blatant thefts of classic games from older systems. There's a version of Atari's Slotcar Racer, Nintendo's Gradius, and even a version of the BMX competition from California Games. There are a variety of shooting games as well, and a few games that are probably original -- Sumo Spaceships being my favorite in multiplayer. With 50 mini games, and most of them being better than average, you could ignore the amusement park aspect of Thrillville all together and still get your money's worth here.
All in all, Thrillville is a simplified version of Rollercoaster Tycoon without the strategy and opportunities to be creative, but with a more mindless, effortless approach to amusement park building. That plus the 50 1-4 player mini games (many of which are thoroughly entertaining) makes this game a great value. It may not be the game that you spend hours and hours working on, but it may end up being the classic that you pull out every time your friends are over just so that you can play those favorite mini games a few more times.
Thrillville: Off the Rails Feature
- Experience family-friendly gameplay with some of the most outlandish roller-coaster concepts ever imagined
- Build and ride 20 death-defying rides, talk and joke with all your guests, and play dozens of minigames
- New lighthearted story ties together 100+ missions, complete with 34 playable multiplayer theme-park games
- Social interaction with park guests both advance the plot and suggest better ways to manage the park
- Visit 15 themed areas like Battleville, Winterville, Spaceville, and Aeroville, all spread throughout 5 new parks
Thrillville: Off the Rails Overview
Thrillville: Off the Rails lives up to its name with 20 death-defying rides so outrageous they inspire the same word from every park visitor who sees them: "WHOA!" Players build these incredible "WHOA Coasters" to leap from one track to another launch through the air like cannonballs blast through burning rings of fire and more. A new lighthearted story ties together more than 100 missions complete with 34 playable multiplayer theme-park games and improved social interaction with park guests. The in-depth conversations both advance the plot and suggest better ways to manage the park. But is every guest to be trusted? One never knows when a rival from the nefarious Globo-Joy might attempt to sabotage Thrillville parks with deceptive information... Format: WII Genre: ACTION/ADVENTURE Rating: RP UPC: 023272406639 Manufacturer No: 40663
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*** Product Information and Prices Stored: Oct 31, 2010 20:00:09
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