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Frontier Developments, the makers of
Rollercoaster Tycoon 3, bring us their new Theme Park Simulator
Thrillville. Thrillville is a PlayStation2
console-exclusive at the moment, with
 ATARI
planning a PSP release just around the corner.
Thrillville is a Theme
Park Simulator that removes itself from the basic principles of it’s
sister-series with ease. The traditions of the genre involve the
player creating rides and food stalls, and maintaining the
developments and cleaning-up, but this time your in the park you
have a chosen character; an on-screen avatar with which to move
about in your park. The title doesn’t feature the considered
pre-requisite Top-Down/Isometric Camera of the genre, but instead
you can see everything to its approximated-size. Thrillville
allows you to talk to the public to see if everything is to there
satisfaction; if their not happy they wont spend there money. So
this way you can ask them what they think of the park and what they
would like. Each park has three areas for you to play with, and
there are Missions to complete – offered in the form of Mini-Games -
to earn money and to get jobs done. If you want to get the park
clean, you have to play as the grounds maintenance man with your
water and hoover pack on your back, washing the sick off the floor
and hoovering-up the rubbish into your pack, earning money for every
item collected.
Thrillville has a lot
to offer, as you also get to ride your own rides, so if you feel
like you need a break you can go to a Coaster and ride it. You can
also play any of the other games on Thrillville such as
Mini-Golf, Hover Car Racing and many more, there are over one
hundred Missions to
 do
in the five different parks, so there is always something to do. As
a Theme Park Simulator, Thrillville proves itself to be an
alternative avenue of expression to the likes of Theme Park
and the Rollercoaster Tycoon series; in that everything in
the park is playable – as opposed to dedicating your efforts to the
finer points of financial management, the game plays through with
the nostalgic vision of the reasons as to why Theme Parks are
so enticingly good fun, acting as a minor Arcade in it’s own right.
Although the game looks childish and easy, there are challenging
games to do in order to make your park succeed. The game plays very
well, and you can still do everything you did on the previous Theme
Park Simulators, such as build your own rollercoasters, and develop
your parks; research and loads more.
Graphiclly this isn’t the best looking Theme Park
Simulator, but as its so big you can understand why. Working in a 3D
world, making rollercoasters do what you want with the new
Rollercoaster Build Tool helping you make the right move, and if you
get lost finding your way back to the start of the ride there is a
track Help Button, which will lay the right track all the way back
to the joining point at the beginning of the ride, making this game
just a little bit easier and more insightful. You can also change
the appearance of your avatar at the beginning of the game,
certainly not a unique feature these days, however, it is rewarding
that this added degree of thought has gone into the title’s
presentation.
As you walk through the park you can hear the
coaster in the background and people screaming; the sound effects
are good in the sense that they
do sound real and they make the game feel more involving. There is
also background music, with random tracks playing, but they are
modern-day groups so you can sing along if you want to. When riding
you rollercoasters you have the ability to raise a scream, so when
your in the cart and your seeing what you character is seeing you
can scream on the loop-the-loops or on the banked corners, or if you
want all the way round.
There are some new, interesting features in
Thrillville, like the new Track Builder and the 3D world that
you move around in, but at heart this is still the classic
rollercoaster game that everyone loved to play but better, with all
the new features in-place and working well. The biggest gripe about
the title’s features is the sense of speed on the rides, or rather,
the lack thereof. As you get to a bigger park you can make
bigger-and-better rides, with huge loop-the-loops; but when the cart
goes up the loop it stops, even if you have a big slope running into
the loop, the cart will get to the top and stop, then go down the
rest of the loop backwards – sending the cart back to the start.
If you were a lover of previous Theme Park Simulator
games, Thrillville is a must-have title, as there is so much
fun to be had on the game. The fact that it distances itself from
many of the genre’s traits my mean some fans feel somewhat
disorientated, but there is so much to do to fulfil one-hundred
percent of the game that those grabbed by the appeal simply won’t be
disappointed. Making this game into a 3D simulator is a big risk,
but it has been well designed, and the decision, in hindsight, was
obviously one borne of confidence in the development team’s
abilities. While Thrillville may not make-or-break the genre,
it’s clear that thanks should go out to Frontier Developments for
this marvellously enjoyable game.
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