Saturday, November 17, 2007

Thrillville: Off the Rails


Thrillville's single-player campaign places you in the role of a theme park manager. Your goals include making the guests happy, ensuring the critics give your park a fair shake, and preventing a rival theme park from ruining your park's reputation. You start off with one theme park broken into three distinctly themed areas. As you complete missions like playing minigames, building certain rides, and managing staff, you're awarded thrill points, which eventually unlock new parks, each with its own theme.

There are simulation aspects to Off the Rails, but nothing as deep as other "Tycoon" games. Sure, you can set prices, run advertising campaigns, and even borrow money, but there's very little benefit to be gained by doing so, and money is never a problem.

Most of your time will be spent placing rides, stalls, and games, and, of course, building coasters. Placing new attractions is a piece of cake: Scroll through a menu until you find what you want to place, locate a good spot, and press a button to drop it into place. Unfortunately, you're a bit limited as to where you can place buildings as well as how many you can place.

Each building consumes power, and each of your park's three areas has a limited amount of power available. This seems to be the game's way of making sure the frame rate can keep up, but it's frustrating to have the room and the money to build something, only to be told that there's not enough power available. This doesn't ruin the game, but it would have been nice to be able to place more stuff.

Building rides is just a small part of the Thrillville experience because everything you build can be ridden or played. There are 50 minigames included here. Many of these are knockoffs of arcade games like Gauntlet, Offroad, and 1942, but there are some original games to be found and most of them are a lot of fun.

First-person shooters; puzzle, racing, and flying games; platformers--you name it, it's here. You can play these minigames anytime you like, and you can even play them from the game's main menu in a party game format. The game does a nice job of integrating them into the campaign. You might need to get a high score in a particular game so that you can win a prize with which to bribe a critic, or you might need to chase off some annoying robots that hack your attractions so that they can ride for free by shooting a bunch of them in a futuristic first-person shooter.

These missions come along just often enough that you'll appreciate the break from running your park, but not so often that you'll feel like they get in the way.

You can spend hours building your park, or you can just play minigames; you can play alone, have someone play the role of advisor, or get a group of people together and play the minigames like a party game. It's how everything comes together that makes Thrillville: Off the Rails such a good overall experience and one that truly is "fun for the whole family."
Posted by wii-play at 7:19 AM
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