Remember Roller Coaster Tycoon? Man, that game was awesome. Building crazed, malevolent roller coasters specifically to make anyone who dared ride them barf up a lung the moment it ended? Brilliant. It’s clear that the people at Frontier Games have played a lot of Roller Coaster Tycoon because Screamride is both an ardent homage to that series, and a game that works hard to eschew many tropes common to the “Tycoon” genre.
My experience with Screamride did not get off to what you could call an awesome start. I jumped directly into Screamrider, what I assumed was the single-player mode, expecting to be allowed to start building roller coasters immediately. What I was presented with was essentially a series of time trials that saw me blasting a roller coaster full of hooting, possibly deranged thrillseekers around pre-built roller coaster courses as quickly as I could.
Whipping your cart around the tracks is fairly straightforward. You can lean your cart left or right to round corners without flying off the rails or losing a rider or two (a joke that never lost its edge – it got big laughs every time it happened). You can accelerate with the R-trigger and brake with the L-trigger. Rolling over boost strips builds a boost meter you can activate for extra speed. It’s interesting for the first few levels, but the novelty quickly wears off – I was on my eighth ninth level of this before becoming a bit disillusioned. “Why would anyone think this was a good idea for a whole game?” I thought. “This can’t be all there is to it.”
Turns out, that’s not the game they made at all, and thank goodness for that. Screamrider mode functions as a kind of tutorial for all the different elements that go into rollercoaster construction. You learn about the boost meters and you see all the areas they’ve been placed in so you know where they should go. You learn about different levels of cornering, about hills and valleys. It’s all useful and it all comes into play later on.
There’s also Demolition Expert which is a score attack style game that is all about creating as much destruction with your wayward rollercoaster as possible. Its loads of fun to play with friends as a couch co-op experience and it really reminded me of the Crash mode from the Burnout series that asked you to do something similar. It requires a certain amount of calculation on your part, the ability to line the dominoes up to the chaos plays out the way you want it to. They’re bizarre physics puzzles your reward for completing them is the kind of pandemonium usually reserved for Michael Bay movies.
Special mention must be given to Frontier for the work that’s been done on their physics engine here because its a real thing of beauty, especially in Demolition Expert mode. When you take a building down, you can see and feel the weight of the structure as it all tumbles spectacularly to the ground. The game renders all of this in real time and I found it so enjoyable to watch that I ended spending a lot of time in Demolition Expert just enjoying the carnage.
The real meat of the experience, though, is in the Sandbox mode and Engineer Challenges. Getting to build your own roller coasters is tremendous fun and the game tries hard to keep any limitations to a minimum. Otherwise, you’re allowed to get as crazy as you like with your designs and hitting down on the D-pad allows you take the design for a test run before it’s even finished for extra lols. The game will also do you the favour of highlighting what it thinks might be problem areas with markers indicating “high velocity”, “high g-forces” and even an indicator of where the last test coaster crashed so you can better retrace your steps and tailor your designs for whatever challenge you might be up against. It’s smart design and really does help you build more interesting coasters.
It’s not all perfect in this mode however. At best, the camera is mildly stubborn about manual positioning, and at worst infuriatingly argumentative. You’re also presented with an array of construction options so broad that you lose the thread of what you were doing. It’s rare to complain that a game is packing too much content but this is a great example of how such a thing can completely derail the player’s train of thought.
There’s a big focus on community-made content here too, which is great because I can really see this one being huge with kids brought up on create-em-up fare like Minecraft. Levels you build can be released onto the in-game community platform for other players to download. You can set your own challenges for them to beat as well. There’s real potential for some truly insane designs here and I’m really looking forward to coming back in six months time and seeing the array of physics-defying horrors the community will have created.
While some old-school players hoping for a return to Roller Coaster Tycoon’s management sim style of gameplay, in addition to crazy roller coaster construction, might be a bit disappointed with what’s on offer here, it can’t be denied that Screamride is a pleasant surprise. What it sets out to do, it does very well for the most part and through a combination of a smartly-designed difficulty curve and no-holds-barred creation tools, it’s able to show you something new on occasion too. If you have a creatively-minded kid (or especially goofy civil engineer) living in your house, they’re going to have a great time with this.
Review Score: 8.0 out of 10
Highlights: Amazing physics; encourages creativity; wicked sense of humour
Lowlights: Some camera issues; truly overwhelming Sandbox options
Developer: Frontier Games
Publisher: Microsoft
Released: 3/3/2015
Platform: Xbox One, Xbox 360
Reviewed on Xbox One
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