ScreamRide - Maxi-Geek Review

What do you get when you take the team behind one of the most successful theme park simulators in history and extreme sports, the answer is ScreamRide.

ScreamRide tasks you, the player to complete challenges in one of three disciplines, riding rollercoasters, destroying things or building them, each path contains a series of ever increasing challenges that will task you to learn all the little tricks to score the best you can in each challenge, but at the same time teaching you that no matter how hard you try, sometimes things will just go the other way.

When you set out to complete the Scream Rider challenges, you will start off with a simple track, getting around it as fast as you can, but when you progress to the later tracks, you will need to contend with loops, twists, corkscrews and even jumps, yes jumps. As you attempt to complete the track, you will be tasked with additional challenges that could see you spending time on two wheels, using all your boost in one go or something just as zany. As you boost around the track, attempting to keep your coaster car on the track, while corkscrewing around, keeping your riders in the car is just as important.

Trying to balance all those tasks at once can introduce a headache pretty easily, but it will almost always do it, whenever you go into the 3rd person view. Placing the camera behind the car will result in the camera doing some pretty out there things, which results in some quick turns. If you keep the camera at the front of the car, you will get the ride experience, but that camera kicks in again, this time making the environment move around in odd ways, in order to follow the track. But the biggest problem with Scream Rider is that is just not fun, riding pre-built coasters is not as exciting as creating your own.

Thankfully you can correct that with Engineering mode you can build your own coaster, while still attempting to meet the challenges on offer. Building a rollercoaster that will create the most screams from the riders is pretty straight forward, a few loops, or a giant drop and you are on your way, but you will also need to consider the extra challenges alongside the main one, like using set pieces or including a set number of inversions, each of these challenges will have you thinking a little more creatively if you want to get the best score possible.

The other mode in the campaign, is the Destruction tier, it is best summed up by Angry Birds in 3d, you are given one of many capsules to launch at buildings, platforms, targets and hoops in the hopes of creating as much destruction as possible. Each building type has a weakness that you need to learn and exploit in order to score the most points, the problem with doing that is the launch mechanism. For most of the challenges the launcher is a mechanical sling, you decide on how much power it gets and it swings the capsule around in a giant circle, you need to press A and decide when to launch it, which can result in the capsule being flung towards the water, up too high or in somecases, behind you.

Once you learn when you should send the capsule flying, you can have some serious fun, taking down one small building only to have it trigger some hidden explosives and bring down a much larger building behind it is really fun. You can also swap out the base capsule for some other designs, one has wings, another splits into pieces and heck there is even one that explodes, for just a little more damage. You are also tasked with using a different launcher from time to time, part of a rollercoaster track, these missions usually give you a rollercoaster car that has wings and allows you to glide for a stretch, giving you the chance to come back around to destroy your target should you miss on the first try.

Out of the three modes, Destruction was the most fun, bring down large structures and even small ones was satisfying, no matter the method. Being able to skim a capsule of the water and into a small gap to trigger a cascading collapse was pure joy. Engineering is perhaps the weakest, simply because you are not fully free to create, with Scream Rider being the most boring, at least you can have more fun with the final two modes when you go into your create mode.

This is where you are let loose, you are given a blank slate to construct, any coaster you can imagine, you just place down your starting space and go from there. While you can jump into this mode from the get go, you won’t have a large range of track pieces to choose from, as you unlock those in the main modes. Once you are happy with your masterpiece, you can choose to ride it, seeing just how awesome or awful it is, of course you will have to deal with the camera. You can also choose to build a flinger, to launch yourself around in those capsules, but that is much hard and requires you to think about your choices more.

You can also customise the scenery around your ride, which is where the most annoying issue with the game comes to light, the technical performance. Placing track pieces is quick and fluid, but placing in scenery causes the game to stutter and slow down, this is likely due to the requirements of the lighting and physics being applied to everything you have placed down, but it is a shame. The worst part though is that while you are given the tools to create rollercoasters, it feels like a shell compared to previous games the studio has worked on.

ScreamRide will give players some fun, mostly with the Destruction and creation modes, but with some awkward camera and performance issues, the game will give you very little reason to return once you have played through it.4

Thanks to Microsoft Australia for supplying the game for review.