Theme Park

"The Rollercoaster Ride All Business Sim Lovers Have Been Waiting For"

Theme Park was for business simulators what Final Fantasy VII was for RPG’s. It made them accessible to the masses and was critically acclaimed while doing so. Very few games get the honour of doing this and that means the games that do must be good.
Well, the PlayStation version of the game basically was to take advantage of the graphics, sound and memory available. While that should mean more, I’ve noticed some of the rides have been dropped from the Mega Drive version.
Still, the heart of the game is exactly the same. The controls are effortlessly simple and are perfectly adapted to the PlayStation. The shoulder buttons bring up certain option screens while the symbol buttons do different things. Notably the new feature here is the Walk Through option, which lets you walk through your park. While this sounds fantastic on paper, it looks blocky and wrong, and adds nothing to the game.
As with lots of business management games, the first 20 minutes is fairly dull, you open a few shops and get the first 3 or 4 rides available but the key to this game is the research screen. From here you can find new shops, rides, trees and toilets and even bigger busses to cope with the masses of oncoming fairground lovers.
Each thing can be altered such as the rides speed and capacity and also how much ice you put in your cola’s!
Added on are buying shares in other people’s parks and constantly getting stock to your food shops. The stock screen actually starts to really annoy after a while though and soon you’d wish there’s an off button for it. Also, the staff pay-up-or-strike screens are welcome but they too crop up a little too often.
Ride’s need fixing, paths need cleaning, shops need stock replacing. And then as soon as you’ve enough money and are satisfied your number one, you sell the park and buy a more expensive one, which a few slightly different rides and a bigger price tag for everything. You must fully develop every park or you’ll fall short of the minimum money required to buy bigger park (up to $20,000,000).
Its all good and fun but after a few parks, there’s nothing that really makes you keep coming back as it gets a little repetitive. In small doses though, it can prove to be a real roller coaster ride of fun! That is unless you go bankrupt, and there’s only one morbid way out of that…

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 08/04/02, Updated 06/30/03