Thrillville: Off the Rails

This game is great. You can create your own rollacosters and ride them. There are also lots of mini games that are great fun alone and with friends. This game is one of my best. Its a must buy. The controls are easy. The other coments about it being confusing is rubbish. its them not the game.

I loved Theme Park World and played it for hours. I was hoping this game would be better than TPW and sadly it's not. Having said that; it is a good game in its own right and I have spent at least 15 hours playing it so far and I'm only about half-way through the missions.

First of all, the screen shots currently being shown look like X-Box shots, the Wii interface is slightly different but the graphics are about the same.

Thrillville is divided into six smaller parks that each have their own theme and a mission storyline. Each one of these parks has three areas with a different style based on the park theme. Each area has three plots where rides, stalls and games can be placed. You don't get to build the park from scratch like in TPW, and you can't change the layout or expand the park area. This is a bit of a shame and sometimes makes fitting everything in a bit difficult.

Each park has its own money, so you can't take your profits from one park to the next. There is a lot of park management control, you can set prices for your stalls, change the coaster speeds and car configurations and everything can be painted. When you recruit new staff you have to train them up by playing a dance-mat game for the entertainers, suck up trash and wash away sick for the cleaners and play a kind of water-pipe game on circuit boards for the mechanics. This does get a bit tedious and repetative after a while and it would be nice if you could just pay for them to train themselves. Money never really seems to run out, so there's not much of a challenge here and the statistics only show the last three month's activity, so it's hard to get a long-term idea of your progress.

The mini-games are quite varied, but there is a bit of samieness in some of them - there are side scrollers and top scrollers, a couple of first person shooters and some racing games that are quite similar. There is a much better implementation of the tanks game that comes with Wii play. Most of the games are quite short and don't seem to have more than eight levels, but this is the trade-off for the large variety of games. Some of the control implementations are a bit awkward and this game is not as active with the Wii remote as some others - you can mostly play it sitting down. You have to compelete the single player story game to unlock a few extra games.

Overall it will keep you occupied for a reasonable amount of time and the mixed bag of mini-games will suit different people so there should be a fairly wide appeal. It's a shame it lacks some of the freedom of TPW, but as I said at the start, it stands up on it's own if you don't make the comparison.

This game is ok, but nothing more. The first couple of parks are quite fun, but it quickly becomes repetitive, as the rides are pretty similar for each park, there are not many stalls available, there is not enough room in each section of the park so you can't preen and primp your park too much, just fit in what you can.

The side shows have some quite good games, but also some not so fun ones. The coasters are just ok too. All in all, an average game on pretty much every level.