Theme Park DS - 6/10
Theme Park was one of my favourite PC games when I was a little kid, and my sister and I used to play it for hours. Even when our PC stopped working and we only had a little laptop to play it on, we played it from 7:00am till lunchtime, and then realized we couldn’t save, and that when we exited we lost all our hard work. And now, with our disk all scratched and unable to play we thought we’d never get to see it again. Until we found Theme Park for DS.
GAMEPLAY: You start off the game with a load of cash (different depending on the difficulty settings), and a massive block of land. You are equipped with an advisor (you can choose from four), and a heap of park-making options at your fingertips. My advice, don’t listen to your advisor. When I did everything my advisor said my park went downhill, as soon as I stopped listening I started making profit!
Depending on how much control you want over your park, or how much you think you can handle, you can choose one of three options. You can choose to either have very little management duties, where all you do is build rides/paths, you can choose to take full (and I mean full) control of everything in your park from building, hiring and ordering stock, or you can choose in between the two. You’ll have the most fun with all the control at your fingertips, though for new players it may be wise to play on a lower difficulty with fewer options until you get the hang of the game.
Placing the Bouncy Castle ride.
There are a multitude of options in Theme Park to keep you busy. You can hire staff, including various entertainers, police, handymen and mechanics. You can build rides, paths and queues; you can add plants, toilets, fences, ponds and more. You can build shops, and order stock for them, you can play around with the prices and wages to your hearts content, and even close the gates to your park, and watch all the sorry visitors slowly leave.
If you play with full control, you can as little or as much money as you want into researching new things for your park. These include new rides, new shops, upgrades for shops and rides, new features (e.g. trees and toilets), staff training and the size of the bus which brings visitors in and out of your park. But don’t put too much money in, or you will soon find yourself in trouble. If you do need a help financially, you can take out a loan from the bank, but this usually will only delay the inevitable. You can also buy stocks in Theme Park, but they also usually end up being a waste of money, or you just forget about them.
Some of the most fun I used to have playing Theme Park on our old PC was building my own rollercoaster’s. Sadly, in Theme Park DS, it just doesn’t seem to gel properly. The track is really jagged, and sometimes you can’t even see where you are building, just guessing where to put the stylus next. You can watch the visitors to your park ride any rollercoaster you make, but sometimes they inexplicably jump back on the rails, and sometimes you can’t even see them at all.
A ride [left], and the ice-cream shop [right].
Another exclusion that I was disappointed in was the inability to ride the rides in your park. I used to love doing that, but, unfortunately, I can’t anymore. I also (still) hate the visitors getting “stuck”. Often your advisor tells you that one of you visitors is stuck somewhere in the park, but, try as you might, you can’t find them! Eventually you will just give up and let them be stuck. On the occasional times that you do find them, you will delete a piece of scenery to set them free; they will walk down, and immediately get stuck again! In one of my parks I had a glitch that, if any visitor stepped on a particular piece of path, they would be flung backwards and get stuck behind a hedge right at the top of the land my park was on. After I deleted part of the hedge to set them free (about 25 had accumulated there), they all walked down and got stuck behind various rides and shops.
From time to time, you will be called into the office for negotiation. This is an easy process, even on the hardest difficulty. You are presented with a hand, which you slide back and forward towards another hand on the opposite side of the screen. Depending on where your hand is, you will have a percentage of how much more (or less) money whoever you are negotiating with will get. Nine out of ten times I had to negotiate I would manage to get a negative percentage, giving me an advantage. If you don’t end up shaking hands within the one minute time limit, there will be small repercussion (e.g. workers will go on strike, suppliers will stop stock delivery), but you will soon get called back to the office for more negotiation.
When you reach a goal for one park, you have the option of selling it and buying some land in a different location. Each location has slightly different shops, and the visitors will be less/more willing to spend money, and have different favourite rides, but they are, unfortunately, pretty much the same thing all over again.
In essence, there is still quite a bit of fun to be had in building your own theme park, and watching happy (or angry) visitors doll out heaps of cash into your coffers.
7/10
GRAPHICS: The graphics look like an ever-so-slightly upgraded version of the old PC version, and they really could have done more. Often the edges of buildings and pictures are really pixilated. There is really a lot of room for improvement here.
6/10
A fairly generic rollercoaster.
SOUND: Who doesn’t love the sound of vomiting patrons and really bad amusement park music? I preferred to play the game with the sound off.
6/10
REPLAY: Once you have finished all the parks you won’t really want to go back and do it all again for a very long time. You may have the occasional time where you get it out to try something you thought would be good but it probably won’t last long. Still, there are plenty of parks to keep you occupied for a while if you are determined to complete them all.
5/10
OVERALL: Theme Park was supposed to be a remake of the PC version, made better for the DS. It ended up being pretty much a carbon copy. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing though, but there are still some edges to iron out, but for the price it is a pretty reasonable purchase, but nothing special.
6/10
By insectoid
Please leave feedback and let me know how to improve!
Submitted by insectoid
17/02/2008
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