Genre: Strategy
Publisher: LucasArts
Developer: Frontier Developments
Release Date: November 21, 2006

Running a theme park isn't easy, and it isn't fun, but Thrillville does its best to fix the second part. Your Uncle Mortimer is a famous eccentric genius in a number of fields, but he mostly creates new kinds of fuel or amazing devices, and all those fantastic inventions go to one place: his theme parks. After you submit rollercoaster designs to him, Mortimer is so impressed with your creativity and drive that he places you in charge of his Thrillville theme park. With his help, you have to manage both the behind-the-scene and public affairs of Thrillville, turning it into the most successful theme park ever.

The behind-the-scenes aspect is done mostly through menus and the classic "god view" found in most simulation titles. Although Mortimer was a genius at theme park design, his financial wizardry wasn't quite up to par, and it's up to you to keep the park in the black. Obviously, the best way to do this is by attracting guests, and Thrillville offers a number of ways to do this. The primary reason guests come to the park is to experience the various thrill rides, but without new and exciting attractions, there is no reason for guests to keep coming back. Luckily, you have Crazy Uncle Mortimer on your side, and by devoting a portion of your profits to his research budget, he'll create new and more fantastic rides, which can then be built in the park. Likewise, you can build new games and refreshment stalls in order to appeal to your guests.

Building rides is fairly fun and easy. Most rides are simply "drop and forget, but for go-karts, rollercoasters and mini-golf courses, you get a bit more control. The players themselves can create the track for any of these courses, allowing you to design the coaster of your dreams at the press of a button. If you're not feeling particularly innovative, a number of pre-made blueprints can be used instead. While placing the rides isn't exactly a party, creating your own rollercoasters is one of the game's best points: It can be incredibly fun to design crazy improbable coasters, and it's probably the aspect of the game that lasts the longest.

Sadly, all the new rides in the world are worthless unless the public at large knows you have them, so marketing is a must. There are a wide variety of different magazines, television networks and newspapers in which you can advertise. Of course, the more people your ad will reach, the more expensive the ad, so balancing out the expensive ads with the need for greater clientele is important. Likewise, advertising is worthless unless you know what your customers are asking for. If demand for more food and drinks is high, creating more rides won't help the attraction at all. Thankfully, the in-game demographic graphs are both easy to read and full of detailed information that makes it easy to keep track of where (and by whom) your money is being spent. If you should run a bit into the red, loans are also available, but they must be paid back at significant interest.

Finally comes the management of the park personnel. The employees come in three different types: mechanics, to keep the rides running; groundskeepers, to clean up the messes; and entertainers, to keep the guests happy. Unlike the rest of management, however, hiring the staff isn't quite so simple. It is up to you, as the owner, to train them to do their jobs via a series of mini-games. Entertainers are trained via a Dance Dance Revolution clone, groundskeepers via a pseudo-FPS, and mechanics by a simplistic puzzle game. This is where Thrillville's biggest flaw comes into play: Rather than focusing on running the park, it instead forces the player into a number of repetitive and boring mini-games. While they are fairly well designed, they quickly grow tiresome. Being forced to play them repeatedly for every new employee you hire just means you'll get sick of them that much faster.

The mini-games don't stop at staff training, either. Once you've got the park running smoothly, it's time to take the day-to-day matters of the guests' enjoyment into your own hands. Leaving the management screen sends you into your self-created avatar within the theme park. This allows you to explore the park on foot, as if you were one of the patrons yourself ... right down to riding all of the rides you've created and playing all of the games.

Most rides are fairly boring and poorly designed: You simply "view" the ride from one of three views (first-person or two views from outside) as it goes about its side. While it can be a bit amusing to view one of your rollercoasters in this fashion, most rides are incredibly uneventful. The select few rides that can be interacted with are low-quality mini-games, such as go-kart racing. While they don't suffer from any problems that make them unplayable, most are simply not fun enough to justify playing them more than once. These same problems go for arcade games as well, which range from clones of Space Invaders to an overly long Gauntlet clone. This would not be a major problem, but in order to advance through the game's storyline mode, you must play these mini-games in order to achieve medals. The mini-games are just not enjoyable enough to justify being such a major portion of the experience.

Beyond playing games, wandering around on foot allows you to schmooze with the guests of the park. Talking with the visitors allows you to get a better idea of what they want to see there, what they don't enjoy, and how they heard about it. Beyond that, it is also possible to chat about various subjects with your guests in order to make them your friends – or even your sweetheart, in the case of female guests.

Unfortunately, chatting about these subjects makes no sense at all. You select a topic from a wide variety, with no sense of if it will please or anger the person to whom you're speaking. Even the discussion subjects are random and pointless; one moment, you may be discussing Greek wrestling, and the next, placental mammals. There is no rhyme or reason to the conversation, and it descends into picking the same answers over and over until the guests "friend" meter is full. For some guests, if you get their "sweetheart" meter high enough, you may take control of them for a brief period of time, in order to introduce them to other patrons and do a bit of match-making. Just like the mini-games, you must talk to (and match up) guests in order to complete missions, and just like the mini-games, it quickly grows repetitive and boring.

Aside from a few stylish cut scenes, Thrillville could easily be a PlayStation 1 game. While the cartoonish art style helps bring the graphics up to an acceptable level, everything is just very notably dated. The character models lack almost any definition; there is a massive amount of repetition among the guests, and the "lighting" often makes these already-scant details nearly impossible to pick out. The rides themselves are fairly well animated, but they seem to lack any real sense of motion or speed to make one forget for a second that he's playing a game. Being able to drop down and explore your theme park is a fun experience, but when it looks this dated, one would almost rather stay up in the sky.

Although it isn't going to win any Oscars, the audio is a real blessings. The voice-acting is top-notch, from the crazy antics of Uncle Mortimer to the various random discussion topics from the daily guests of the park. Likewise, the music is very well done and never feels forced; a mix of pop tunes and original music blends together excellently, and it doesn't intrude on the experience at all. My only complaint is that I wish there were a wider variety of songs, as the repetition starts to become a bit more obvious once one has played the game a while, especially if a lot of that time is spent training entertainers, which brings up the DDR-esque mini-game.

In the end, Thrillville is a theme park simulator that tries something new. It doesn't succeed perfectly, and falls into that tragic bridge where it's too complex for newcomers to the genre and far too simple for hardcore simulator fans. Other than the multiplayer versions of the park's mini-games, there is little to keep players continuing after they have finished all of the available parks, and the dated graphics make it difficult to enjoy the rides you've created yourself. If you're in the mood for a light family-friendly game, there are worse choices than Thrillville, and I hold out hope for a sequel that can fix the problems with this promising franchise.

Score: 6.5 /10