Thrillville - updated impressions
Turns out running your own theme park doesn't have to be dreadfully boring
You'll still need to tend to the business aspects of running a park, but that's been made fun, too. The rides need maintenance, so you'll have to hire staff to keep them running - but thankfully, the training sequence is a minigame unto itself. Same goes for the groundskeepers: strap on a vacuum and suck up the papers and empty cans yourself for a few minutes to train your main trash picker-upper. Once he learns, he'll train other personnel on his own.
Building and riding the rides is clearly the main hook (in addition to the mission-based game mode, there's a Blueprint mode that lets you build and test wacky creations just for sandbox fun) and, while this could have been a chore, our demo showed how easy it was. Shuffle through track segments and tack them onto each other; if one doesn't fit, it'll turn red. Just try another. If you get partway through building a ride and sort of lose interest, simply ask the game to try to finish the track for you. And if you build a ride that's, you know, impossible, the game will fudge the physics for you rather than strand your train on the tracks.
Sign up to the 12DOVE Newsletter
Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more