Review of Thrillville: Off The Rails

As a 14 year old I got the game and the concept of being able to run around your park and ride the rides and play the games sounded like a really neat concept unfortunately i was terribly dissapointed. Firstly one of the main problems with the game is that managing your park requires no work at all, all there is to the game is playing the minigames and the roleplaying aspect of it. Unlike other similarly based games such as rollercoaster tycoon, this game provides no challenge in making your park a success, you dont need to manage your finances, you dont need to maintain guest happyness and you dont need to manage your staff in any way at all. The financial part of the game is terribly easy because without even trying you make money, even if you were trying to make your park a complete faliure i dont think it would be possible unless you made all your attractions free. It doesnt matter if your guests are happy or not because THERE IS NO EXIT TO THE PARK! and the number of guests in the park doesnt matter anyhow. and managing the staff doesnt matter because like i said the guest happyness doesnt matter, and rides hardly ever break down.
Besides the park manager part of the game there are severe limitations to the parks, each park has three areas in it, in each area you can make 2 rollercoasters at the pre determined rollercoaster locations, and each area has two small areas where you can build other attractions, the parks start with rides and coasters in them, and you cant remove any of the large annoying scenery to make more room for your park and rides, there is no way to buy more space which really makes little sense, and the whole game is not about running a park, its about "thwarting globo-joy".
Then there are problems with the game itself, firstly many of the "minigames you can play are either no fun, or dont work properly" also the keypress recognition is terrible! I could press the spacebar twenty times to open the menu without a single thing happening! As you can probably imagine that makes the games worth playing a lot harder to play.
then there is the "off the rails" aspect. Supposedly you can make the rollercoasters do jumps, well if you can i certainly havent been able to. Also one of the things that was going to make this game interesting for me was that you could just let the track end and send the coasters flying into the crowds and make a huge explosion(when you are a 14 year old boy that is a large part of the appeal) unfortunately i found that when you make a coaster whos track doesnt end, all the people are ejected out of the coaster, magically sprout propellers, and float gently to the ground. Meanwhile the car of the rollercoaster has some how appeared back at the launching station insted of ploughing into the crowds. Also the coasters have no physics applying to them, none of them have lift hills, they are just "launched" up a 500ft vertical track (as if thats going to happen on a real roller coaster) despite what i do to try and make these coasters not have enough speed to get up a hill and start rolling backwards into the next train (this was my next attempt to cause some explosions) but amazingly in thrillville there is no such thing as physics. miraculously the rollercoaster went up an 80 degree hill that went about 100 feet high at around 2MPH! who comes up with this, seriously!


All in all i think the concept of the game is great! but the game itself is poorly designed, poorly executed, and the objectives and storyline need some serious help.



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