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Rating: Good Sim Theme Park is a very addictive game that isn't quite as deep as Bullfrog's previous simulation games. It's incredibly fun for a while, but the shine eventually wears off and a relatively shallow game is found underneath. There are two areas of discussion when it comes to Sim Theme Park: What makes it such a very good game, and what prevents it from being an awesome game. The things that make it a very good game are the same things that make most of Bullfrog's games so good. It's a very addictive formula to build a business from scratch, expand it to reach new heights, maintain all the aspects of the business so that it doesn't fall apart, and then start the process all over again. The same basic simulation elements that are found in Theme Hospital are also found in Sim Theme Park; the only major difference is that you're building a theme park instead of a hospital. If you want more details on what makes this gameplay formula work so well, you can read my Theme Hospital Review. The problem with Sim Theme Park is that rather than simply adapting Theme Hospital's classic gameplay formula to a theme park (which would have been just fine), they changed it way too much, possibly in an attempt to make the game more "mass-market." While Theme Hospital is an extremely deep game that would thoroughly entertain me if I pulled it out today, I've already reached a point in Sim Theme Park where I feel like I've done everything there is to do. Theme Hospital's patients are fairly large and detailed, letting you see each of their facial expressions and mood changes. On the other hand, Sim Theme Park's visitors are tiny dots with no detail whatsoever. Besides being ugly, this eliminates most of the game's personality right off the bat. Where's the sense of satisfaction in seeing a particular visitor enjoy your park and leave with a smile on their face? The visitors in Sim Theme Park show about as much personality as a dried-up orange peel. There are only a few different "tiny dot models," and they're often bunched together in clusters. This usually makes it impossible to track the progress of one particular visitor. Visitors also have a tendency to wander around randomly, often walking back and forth in a particular area of the park for long periods of time. This is a stark contrast to the clear and logical journey of each individual patient in Theme Hospital. I could have lived with the lackluster graphics if they were this game's only problems. After all, Civilization 2 is one of the deepest games of all time, but it looks like an NES game. The biggest problem with Sim Theme Park is that it's simply not as deep or strategic as any of Bullfrog's previous simulations. All you really have to do is research everything like there's no tomorrow and build everything you possibly can, and you'll eventually meet the level objectives and move on to the next park. The level of micro-management in the game is quite small, which is a good thing for action games and a bad thing for simulations. What little micro-management the game has is often rendered useless by quirks in the Artificial Intelligence. For example, lowering the prices at your stores doesn't significantly increase business. It is extremely rare for anyone to ever buy something from a Burger Shop or Fries Shop, regardless of whether you're charging an unreasonably high price or 1/60th of the default price. Sim Theme Park's micro-management requires a lot of effort to get a very small reward. There are plenty of other flaws in the AI that had to have been noticed by the testers at EA and Bullfrog. Sometimes you have to build a particular ride a few tiles away from everything else in the park due to the large size of some rides. Often times when you have to do this, visitors will never, ever get on the ride, even if it has the highest possible excitement rating. Also, mechanics regularly ignore orders to upgrade or fix rides, and they spend most of their time wandering around aimlessly rather than doing their jobs. The incompetent mechanics would have been more than enough to make upgrading your rides a painful task, but the game also resets all of your custom settings for each ride after every upgrade. Sim Theme Park is unrealistic in the things that it demands from you, or more accurately, the things that it doesn't demand from you. Basic things like hiring security guards and building bathrooms are completely un- necessary in the game, with no clear consequences for skipping out on them. In reality, a theme park with no bathrooms would be shut down by the Board of Health very quickly, and a park with no security guards would be ruled by anarchy within hours. The pace of the game is painfully slow, and there are no settings to change the speed. Simulation games should let you play at a blindingly fast speed, a slow-motion speed, or anywhere in between. Sim Theme Park forces you to play in slow-motion and doesn't give you any choice in the matter. There are occasional awards given out in Sim Theme Park, but there are no annual awards that compare you to computer-controlled establishments. These annual awards added a nice sense of perspective to Theme Hospital, but they're strangely missing from Sim Theme Park. Also, the bizarre cinemas still refer to the game as Theme Park World, which is what it was called before EA decided to do some deceptive cross-branding with the "Sim" brand for the game's US release. The inherent problem with this kind of game on a console is that it was originally designed from the bottom up to run on the PC's mouse and keyboard set-up. The PlayStation version's interface is decent and it could have been a lot worse, but it still can't compare to the PC version's. The interface makes many tasks in the game harder than they should be. Most annoying of all is the fact that the in-game cursor is actually invisible, and objects have a light green glow to them when they're "highlighted." Why not just put a freakin' cursor in the game so that you don't have to use trial and error to highlight an object? Rather than being an improvement over its predecessor, this game is actually much worse than Theme Hospital in the important areas of depth, strategy, micro-management, and individuality. Sim Theme Park makes for a great weekend rental, and that could easily turn into a week-long rental if you get addicted. But ultimately, if you want a simulation game from Bullfrog, this isn't the one to get. Send your thoughts on this review to ivan@mastergamer.com
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