An entertaining and light-hearted sequel that can please gamers of all ages.
Truth be told, over the years this capable crew has published numerous colorful and adventurous titles that range from Greek heroes battling in the after life, to educational children programs. Going one step further than most Sims titles; the second version of Thrillville, dubbed Off the Rails, caters to anyone who loves rollercoaster's and theme parks by allowing complete modification of everything that keeps park attendants happy. Surprisingly, the game is basically a rehash of the first, but the vast amounts of added side quests and mini games really make this a fun title for people of various ages.
GAMEPLAY
If you've ever played a game based on simulation and micro-management, OTR serves it by the bucket loads. Tagged as the new park manager, you go through a bare bones character creator where selection is crippled by simple pants or shorts, guy or girl, plain or creepy cosmetic options. Once you're created, the real chores begin as you familiarize yourself with the park operations.
At first, this is not so bad as you tackle minor task such as hiring staff to entertain/clean/maintain the park. From here you populate the park with particular mini games and theme rides to help lure in park guest, and to keep them further happy; you can build concession stands and restrooms for comfort and stomach delights. If you bore easily with the God view looking down upon your creations, you can traverse the park with your created manager on foot and actually interact with guests. This function was simple in the first Thrillville, and it still serves as a mundane time-killer. Yet, with a few key choices during these interactions you can acquire valuable insight in how to better improve the park, become friends, compete in games, and actually develop love interest. Since the game is mostly structured for children and teens, the intimacy doesn't extend past hugs and warm dialogue, which of course is fitted for guy and gal action only.
Once the foundation of the park is laid out, you mainly progress through the story by completing park objectives that require creation milestones and fetch quests. This is where OTR can easily lose most gamers, young and old. Being that every park usually asks for the same objectives to be completed, mostly varying with increased numbers or approval ratings, the overall 5 parks that can be unlocked really can drag on and become tedious.
If you fancy yourself as a digital artist of architect, OTR could salvage some much-needed respect in allowing for great park customization. Besides laying the foundation of each park down with required numbers and area limitations, your imagination can go wild when placing mini-games, food and beverage stands, restrooms, park staff, and user created rollercoaster's. All which can be altered in color and design or shape and main appeal. Like I said, this level of hands on interaction is really the core selling point of OTR. With a multitude of side distractions that offer a few decent hours of extra game play, anyone who feels shafted in theme park thrills can rejoice in over 50 mini games that all look and play fairly different and also allows for difficulty adjustments. A pretty nice perk to co-op and multiplayer is the 2 to 4 player versus action that can be enjoyed shoulder-to-shoulder, or online over XBL.
VISUALS
Thrillville:Off the Rails is all about the fun factor that can be had maintaining an imaginary theme park, paying no mind to how good it looks while doing so. This could be a major knock against a game that is far from shy about making its intentions clear, yet there are some areas where character models and overall animation come up so short, its hard to excuse.
When you first create your aspiring park manager, the selection is greatly limited to boys and girls between the ages of 8-15, which is even more difficult to stomach as the clothing attire mostly consist of generic GAP fashion. Supposedly, a teenager who is tasked with "managing" an entire theme park organization only wants to wear shorts and bland t-shirts, which is pretty lame once you realize park guests sport just about the same closet.
With the ability to adjust colors and prop designs for main attractions, the double-edge sword also hampers variety. You can rejoice in the creation of a stellar rollercoaster by not only riding it yourself and experiencing the thrills first hand; you also feel the constrictions of simply placing things in confined areas with nothing more than direction orientation.
One area where OTR really won me over was in the massive selection of mini games and the variety in how each game looked and played. Even with the borrowed elements that obviously resemble games we've played the last 20 years, OTR really puts a nice spin on each mini that almost stands well enough to be their own full fledge titles.
AUDIO
The most difficult area of this game to judge is strangely the most appealing for me. With a strong array of dialogue spoken between park guests and your created male or female manager, the voice work is average at best. Some areas are really rough around the edges and are simply laughable in how badly their done, while other moments really shine with good range of emotion. This tug of war in quality is present in other aspects of the game such as unregistered sound effects and missing dialogue, which happens every so often depending on the speed of play. Other areas like music within mini games and hilarious dialogue responses help smooth out the unsavory audio, but there is too much inconsistency to help void such unforgiving technical negatives that encourage muted volume.
EXTRAS
One of the big reasons why I highlight OTR as a decent game for kids is mostly due to the forgiving difficulty settings. When you first start off, mini games and park management task are all pretty straightforward and simple. As you progress to the more advance parks and objectives, the goals still remain pretty lofty allowing plenty of room for mistakes and never push for any sense of urgency.
Beyond leveling up in park management (which maxes out at 10) you have plenty of mini game achievements to keep you busy as parks basically sit in the background incurring interest so that the story unfolds. With the story and the management levels, you can easily scoop up about 500 points simply playing from start to finish completing all the main objectives.
If you prefer more hands on action, you can take part in various activities that range from challenging special park guest, accomplishing minor feats within mini games, and hunting down items hidden through out the 5 parks. With a hefty illusion of variety, any kid could dump hours of effort into games and activities that never really offer gamer points and still have plenty of fun. Since there is the luxury of viewing the achievements list from the get-go, any determined points monger could go down the checklist and easily rake in about 200-300 extra points away from the plot.
OVERALL
Thrillville:Off the Rails really doesn't offer anything dramatically different in the world of simulation. You create a player, navigate imaginary theme parks, assist staff members and park guest, and basically decorate. It could be somewhat insulting to assume this as the perfect children's game, because I'm sure any teen or adult who finds at least one thing worth enjoying in OTR might feel targeted for teasing.
Not the case here. Games like this don't require shutting down of the brain, or numbing of high expectations. What I see in this theme park creation series is a lot of potential, great gaming mechanics, fun presentation in the visuals and audio, and a really entertaining concept that could easily blossom with continued development. Compared to the last version of Thrillville, improvements and polish are minor at best in OTR. For anyone new to this quirky genre and doesn't mind renting a game for the weekend, I'm sure OTR will offer something worth mentioning after a few hours of gaming. If not, you can rest assured that another version of Thrillville is in the making, and the next addition will likely build upon its proven strengths; which is surprising to say being the cynic, but are quite numerous and robust.