Thrillville: Off the Rails

Thrillville: Off the Rails

Tycoon games are tough. Too complex and you drive off everyone who isn't a CPA; too simple and you make it boring for anyone with half a brain. Thrillville errs on the "too simple" side, making you the teenage grandchild of a scatterbrained theme park owner, tasked with bringing the many parks back up to code, building and researching new rides, and helping other hormonal kids hook up while they're at the park. The last part is just as creepy as it sounds.

Colorful graphics and a very nifty no-load-screen cheat bring a lot of charm to the game, and dozens of intricate animations are running at any time, while every single guest in your park can be interacted with, using fairly unique dialog trees. While cartoonish, the graphics are bright and fun, with a lot of diversity in the fifteen "worlds" spread across five parks to enjoy. The two dozen or so minigames feature PS2 launch-title graphics, but being minigames, you aren't forced to suffer through them more than once if you don't want to.

The music is atrocious- there are 3 three-minute long pop songs, and they unfortunately all have insipid lyrics, playing in a loop in every part of the game down to the starting menu. Reach for the iPod or streaming music from moment one, or these bubblegum songs will stick with you forever. On the plus side, every conversation and dialog tree is voiced by a convincingly different assortment of voice actors, keeping it from feeling like you're talking to the same voice actor with a different accent all game.

The many Financial screens are laid out in a decently user-friendly intuitive format for a console game, and engaging in most actions is straightforward; sadly the game (barely more than a port of the PS2 title from a year before) does not capitalize on the greatest controller ever created, and this 360 title's unchangable button-maps at times feel like they've been shoehorned instead of assigned more natural.

The game's breezy challenge level is clearly tied into it's target audience of tweens, and nowhere is that more obvious than the puppy-loving "dating sim" portions of the game, where you have to learn from previous responses what sort of things a particular teenager likes and dislikes before you run out of conversation options to get them to be a "Love Interest." If you succeed, a hug from the date is the reward. Since the game keeps firm to its "E" rating, you won't find any creepy lines, but the innocence is sickly in its own saccharine way.

Graphics: It's a PS2 port, with very little work done to hide that. 2.
Sound: Full voice-over work is fine, but the soundtrack is dreadful and mercifully short. 1.
Controls: Intuitive menu navigation, but the minigame controls are a mixed bag. 3.
Tilt: Absent of any challenge, but also lacking the charm of a true "chillaxin' and playin' games" game like Uno or A Kingdom for Keflings. 3.
Overall (not an average): 2.