Sim Theme Park

Reviews / previews

Review: Sim Theme Park

STP gives gamers a chance to design and manage their own amusement parks--from hiring and firing employees to building and maintaining rides. You choose one of four themes: Lost Kingdom, Halloween, Land of Wonders, and Space Zone. (Only the first two are available at the beginning of the game.)

Each theme has its own distinctive style. From the giant, banana-swinging ape in the Lost Kingdom to the coffin-shaped bathrooms in the Tim Burton-style Halloween world, each ride and feature is instilled with a quirky sense of humor. Likewise, each has its own music and sound effects to accompany the clatter of coasters and screaming kids. The Halloween park is filled with spooky howls and bells, while, in the Lost Kingdom, you can hear jungle drums and the roar of wild animals.

Managing your park is simple. You use a remote control to buy rides and hire staff, view charts, and monitor research and spending. Along the way, an advisor will give you hints and suggestions and warn you when your rides are about to break down.

Designing coasters is a snap. You start by placing track supports. Put down one and the map displays where the next one can go. After you complete a circuit, you can make adjustments to your heart's content--raising, lowering or moving the pylons or twisting and banking the tracks.

When your park meets special requirements--for example, a certain number of visitors or a certain level of happiness--you'll earn golden tickets that can be used to purchase special rides. Win three golden tickets and you receive a golden key that unlocks another theme.

Unfortunately, the goals aren't specified in advance, so you have to just keep building until the advisor tells you that you're about to win a ticket. With no specific goals, there's not much to motivate the player to keep building, and once all the parks and rides have been unlocked, you have little reason to go back and start from scratch. Although, according to the official web site, new rides will soon be available for downloading, hopefully adding to the longevity of the game.

As an added bonus, SimTheme Park gives players the ability to actually enter their park and try out the rides from a first-person perspective. While this adds nothing to the gameplay, it's still a lot of fun to wander around and see what goes on through the visitor's eyes.

I do have one minor complaint: When setting patrol areas for employees, the zone isn't displayed as an overlay on the actual park. You have to bring up a separate map to see it.

Also, for best results, you'll want to play on a fairly high-end system. On my aging PII266 when the park got especially crowded with visitors and rides, scrolling the camera would cause the game to slow down although not so much to disrupt the gameplay.

But despite a few flaws, SimTheme Park is a blast. It supplies enough micro-management to keep you busy for hours and the twisted humor is sure to make you laugh.-- Brian Wright / GamePro