Thrillville is not what it appears to be at first glance. You may think of this game as compared to a
RollerCoaster Tycoon style of game but in actuality it is more of a collection of mini-games tossed into an amusement park that you put together and manage. This game takes out a lot of the micro-management and focuses more on just playing a variety of mini-games and completion of missions that open up as you build your park. There are still some management aspects of course, and you need to build your park with a focus on getting more people to come. You just don't need to do this with a fine-tooth comb with this one and I liked the idea.
Story There really is not any story-line here besides your uncle Mortimer has asked you to take over management duties of Thrillvill's chain of amusement parks. This way he can concentrate on the R&D aspects and stay a step ahead of the competition. The rival amusement park owner Vernon Garrison is always trying to sabotage, spread rumors, and anything he can to slow down your progresses and stop people from going to your parks. Since the parks you are taking over management on have already started to be built your job is just to add-on, upgrade, and making sure everyone is having fun. The only story here is in-between taking on a new park and some missions throughout that you need to accomplish to prevent Garrison from doing whatever it is he is doing to wrong your park. This reminds me of the
Sim games where you must accomplish different small missions to get further in the game and unlock different things with a little story tossed in.
Game Play You start off taking the management duties of one of the five parks this game has to offer. You unlock the other parks by completing a percentage of the 25 missions that are in each park. These start off fairy easy and get more complex as you travel to the different parks. If you just go for the minimum requirements this game will only take a little over 10 hours to complete. It is worth completing them all just for the fun of it and if you get a 100% mission completion you will unlock a couple of different ways to play the mini-games in party mode. Each of these missions have a gold, silver, and bronze completion percentage as well. Again, getting all of these gold gets you better rewards.
The missions are divided into categories such as build, game, guest, upkeep, and business. As you run around placing rides, stalls, interacting with guests, and finding things around your park you will be completing some of these missions. The build and business missions are what you would expect in a "sim" style game. Build missions mostly involve placing certain rides or games in your park. They may even ask you to place a certain type of coaster with certain stats like length of the coaster, speed, or maybe the number of total drops your coaster has. These are usually easy enough but, later in the game some of the coaster ones can be a little harder. The business side of things will have you focusing overall ratings in your parks like thirst, hunger, nausea, or your total thrill rating. You will even have attract different age groups to your park like teenagers, children, or adults. Again, these missions tend to get harder as you progress through the game.
The games and upkeep missions are where you interact with the guests and employees in your park. The game missions are exactly what they sound like, you play games and try and beat your opponent's score. These also get harder as the game plays on. The upkeep missions are where you train your employees and play little mini-games to do so. The mechanic mini-game is fairly easy and is very repetitive while the groundskeeper can be a bit more entertaining because at least the game changes as you run around and pick up trash and other things. Training your entertainer is the most fun and one of the best games in this game. This is where you will first notice the good soundtrack. You are given a song and your goal is match the buttons that you see on screen staying in rhythm. These also get harder and harder as you play through and each section of each park has a different song.
The guest missions are where you interact with your different guests. These missions are easy and don't really get to interesting. You mainly want to build up friendships, or even love interests, so you get a small boost in your popularity which in turn gets you a little bonus on attracting people to your parks. You will also get some information on how well your park is doing and if you need improvements anywhere. You won't find yourself here to often as you can get that information just walking around the park and hearing your patrons speak to each other. In order to get guests to like you, you must find out what they are interested in and just chat about it. If they like the subject their friend meter goes up a little and reverse if you pick a subject they don't care about. You just need to remember which is which. Some of the conversations can be pretty funny, especially if you pick a subject or try and flirt with someone that is not interested in you that way yet. However, unless you really want to get all of the friends you can to get that boost you probably won't find yourself interacting much with your other guests unless you have to.
Controls The all around controls of the game are easy enough to understand and get the hang of with out ever getting frustrated. Placing and rotating rides, games, and stalls is easy and user friendly. The same goes for building coasters and race tracks. There is a nice tutorial that explains in detail how to build and use all of the tricks of your coasters and everything else you need to know. The menus may look like a lot when you first start but, in no time and little thumbing around you should have then down quickly. Controlling your missions is also a snap. You can go right to a menu and look at each mission that you have unlocked at that time and see where your stats are in that mission at the time. You can also just press a button jump to any mission you wish from that menu saving time trying to run around and find guest or game missions you need to complete.
There are a couple of things that was added to this game to make it so much more enjoyable, in my opinion, and note worthy. First off, you are given a map of your park that shows each and every ride, stall, and persons of interest. With just a click of a button you can jump to any location in your park you want to quickly. This will save you so much time throughout the game. You are also able to run in this game saving you even more time if you are looking for something in particular. The game is very user friendly when it comes to a great instruction booklet, tutorials, and easy to understand menus.
Mini-games There are quite a lot of mini-games you will end up playing throughout the game and for the most part, the mini-games are well designed with easy to use controls. There is also a good variety here as well. There are exceptions to everything of course. On the good side, for example, are the first-person shooters. They are surprisingly in-depth. As you run around shooting robots or scarecrows you find a number of different weapons and bonuses. It also matters where you hit your adversaries as well. give them a nice head-shot and they are down and you get more points. You can have some fun by taking their shooting arms off and leaving them as no threat. Although you don't receive as many points for this, it is just fun sometimes. Also, the AI is much better than I imagined it would be. These opponents will duck behind things to avoid your shots and they shoot very well. They won't just stand there if you shoot at one and miss and they didn't see you. They will spin around and start blasting. On a bad note, there is a dungeon crawler that looks like the
Gauntlet game but, much cheesier and time consuming. All though the AI here is good enough, you just don't feel like you are having any fun. But, you only have to play this a couple of times in the single-player mode and the game is easy get what you need to complete those missions. In all, you will see a lot of old video game "knockoffs" which again are mostly a lot of fun and will bring back some video game memories for us older gamers.
Graphics The graphics have different areas which are good and some that are not so good. The game is made to look cartoonish which helps you forget about some of the negatives. For example, player models are squarish and not polished well at all but, animations are well done in conversation. There are at least a lot of different looking type of characters so walking around seeing hundreds of people in your parks does not get repetitive. The mini-games are the same as some are authentic and done very well while others has a feel that you just went back 20 years in gaming. For example, the bumper cars and shoot-zones are well done and look authentic and with the sounds being as good as they are you get a great feeling playing these. But, a few other games like Even Horizon look like they were just kind of tossed into the game quickly to add more. There are just a few laughable cut-scenes that do look great.
The parks themselves look well enough as different sections have different themes. In some sections you may find saloons or dinosaurs in the background which gives you a feel of what type of rides to put in these sections to continue the theme aspect. These also take on a cartoonish look and are not polished to well. However, the rides themselves look good and being able to customize each one to the color scheme you want adds some good hands on to the overall graphics of your different parks. This includes all of the stalls in the game as well as coasters. You will also enjoy the effort put in to being able to ride each everything in your parks. You will get a sense of being on the ride and maybe even get a little woozy yourself since there are different camera angles to view from. This also looks good as you are spinning around and around or taking a dive on a coaster. There is also no frame rate issues at all no matter what ride you are on or how many people are on screen at once (this will be a lot at times). in all, if you can take the good with the bad you should enjoy what they attempted to do with this game. Besides the player models that I feel could have used at least a little more attention I have no real complaints.
Sound The sounds throughout the game are very well done from the sounds of the coasters zipping past overhead to the in-game conversations. The mini-games themselves sound great from the robots "clanking" when you tag them with your guns to the bumper cars bouncing off the rails. Even the park itself has a great ambient sound effect that is true to life as you just walk around your park. You will hear people just talking to one another as you pass by them (sometimes giving you useful information) or you may hear some screaming from a ride as you approach. You will get the feeling as if you were at a theme park with all the sounds going on around you. This is a section they really put effort in and it came together great.
The soundtrack throughout the game is also excellent and has a lot of variety. The music plays softly in the background throughout the game but, doesn't overwhelm you. The best part about this is, during the rhythm mini-game as you train your entertainers, for each section of your different parks is a different song that plays. These songs have a lot of different tones from country to rap and keeps the game flowing well. You can also hear these songs on a PA system throughout all of the different sections of the parks. As you approach these, you will hear different announcements or different music depending on the overall theme of the section you are in. As you get further from the PA these sounds get softer and softer. Another way you will get the feeling as if you were actually there. Overall, the sounds and music are done extremely well throughout the entire game with no complaints from me.
Conclusion In all,
Thrillville is a well rounded fun little game. However, this is not a game for everyone by any means. The variety of mini-games and the depth of building your own coasters and race tracks is well done and more than I expected when I first put the game in. I enjoyed playing through the game once and completing everything I could. That was the extent of it though as I have not put the game back in since. There really is not any replay value here and once you complete the game there is not much to go back and do. At least you can play all the mini-games any time you want with friends/family and try to out do each other in Part Play or even a Tourney Mode and that is probably all that the game will ever get used for once completed. If you have played this style of game before and enjoyed it then this is a game worth picking up for the cheaper price that it is today. Also, young teens will probably enjoy this game as well. If you are not into this style of game play then this is probably not going to change your mind about them and not worth your time.
Thank you for reading.
Please check out some of my other Sim type game reviews if interested Theme Hospital Tropico My Ratings: Story 2.5/5
Game Play: 4/5
Controls 5/5
Graphics: 3.5/5
Sound: 5/5
Learning Curve: 30min
Replay Value: 2/5
Overall Rating: 4/5
Publisher: LucasArts
Developer: Frontier Developments
Genre: Role-Playing
ESRB Everyone 10+
Game Specs Players: 1-4
Resolution: 480p
Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1
Cooperative Play: No
