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Theme Park Bullfrog Review – the rollercoaster ride of your life

Ready for the ride of your life? We are going back and looking at a game that has spanned across pc, consoles and even onto mobiles; Ladies and Gentlemen welcome to Theme Park.

Theme Park – the rollercoaster ride of your life

An instant success when released in 1994, Theme Park offered something different from the run of the mill games being released at the time; you were given a small plot of land and a couple of thousand pounds to create just about whatever your mind could create. You did need to work for it but this was the clever part and the genius of this game as it didn’t feel like a struggle or like you were working hard to achieve your ultimate Theme Park.

You start with a gate, a ticket booth, and a bog standard merry go round with a few food and drink establishments to place in your park (not forgetting old rickety toilets). The park was your design however you felt at the time as long as you attached your rides to the pathway you had laid, this was to lead people in and there were toilets and a drink and burger stall – so your first few hundred visitors were happy!

As the game progressed the little buses that dropped off your visitors got bigger and became coaches. The rides got more elaborate and visitors became more demanding wanting the next big ride (and so did you). This is where skill and strategy came in to play and you probably were not even aware of it.

The park could not run on peanuts so prices needed altering on certain products to gain more money. The chips were made saltier to make people require a drink again to make more money. As you earned more money more attractions and rides became available and had to be managed, of course you couldn’t just click a ride and make it magically fix when it broke as this required engineers.

Good staff do not come cheap

It wasn’t just engineers your Park required though, you needed security to deal with vandals, cleaning personnel to deal with dirty toilets, not forgetting the vomit splattered pathways from kids who had been on the roller coaster one too many times. You also needed entertainers to keep your guests happy and amused while they queued up for your latest attraction.

Building a theme park isn’t easy…

Another strategic part of the game was deciding which rides to keep and which to lose to make room for your new more sensational ride. Did you keep the popular tree house ride or do away with it for the new pirate ship ride? Decisions decisions… All of this cost money to develop so prices had to be altered, and even the chance of winning on the duck shoot to keep the price of prizes down had to be considered.

Star Struck Gaming Rating

You will definitely not regret picking this game up from your local store or more than likely very cheaply online.

Theme Park spawned many successors such as Theme Hospital and Theme park World. These titles all had heavy doses of humour with quirky graphics that were colourful and bright which fitted perfectly to the game, again proving my old argument that graphics don’t make the game.

Theme Park is still a very playable and addictive game to this day, it still has the ‘I’ll just make one more ride draw to it’ and you find yourself still sitting in front of the PC at 3 in the morning. The excitement constantly exploded in you as you notice the bus has got bigger that’s bringing in guests and you’re number 1 in the table of theme parks.

So with that I’ll leave you all to go forth and build your parks and get lost in the worlds you create and love, if you do why not post pics of your best parks? We love the feedback and to see that we have inspired people.

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