Previews

Hands-on with Capcom's management-freemium hybrid Dream Park on iPhone and iPad

Swings and rollercoasters

Hands-on with Capcom's management-freemium hybrid Dream Park on iPhone and iPad
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iOS
| Dream Park

Theme parks appear to be back in fashion, what with both EA Mobile and Capcom working on freemium-based attractions for later in the year.

What distinguishes Capcom's Dream Park from the many funfair freemium games already available on iOS is that it’s managed to sneak some strategy in under all the timers.

Must be this tall to ride

You start with a pretty bare patch of ground and some cash to build a few basic vending machines and your central ‘castle’. There are three themes to pick for your park - Jurassic, Futuristic, and Medieval. If you pick the latter then a castle is exactly what you get.

Your vending machines generate a basic amount of cash on their own, with punters walking up to each and popping cold, hard, delicious cash into their mechanical innards.

As you might expect, you collect the cash gathered after a certain time has elapsed, with the cheaper machines producing the goods quicker.

Once you have enough cash, and your player level is high enough, you can then start placing down rides and attractions (and install ropes to help with the queues). These range from your funfair carousels and tea-cup rides right through to huge rollercoasters.

Should have added more salt?

But placing down objects willy-nilly won’t get you the big bucks. Putting vending machines and stalls near rides, for instance, will increase the cash they produce thanks to punters naturally gravitating towards the former and then following up with the latter.

Meanwhile, you can individually set how expensive each object is in order to extract that little bit extra out of the punters. There’s a balancing act at work, though, for the higher you set the prices the less likely people are to spend their money there.

Also adding to the overall value of your rides and shops is your park happiness rating. This is influenced by what beautifications and helpful services have been made (like boulevards or rubbish bins).

These strategic elements are what sets Dream Park apart from the rest at a gameplay level, given that it moves the game away from being purely about waiting to spend coins or speeding things up with the paid-for tickets.

Get by with a little help...

A feature that seems to be inherited from the Facebook side of social gaming is how your friends can influence your park.

Rather than just being split between real-money items and in-game items, Dream Park also lets you construct special buildings depending on how many friends you can get involved.

The attractive 2D cartoon graphics and blend of freemium and strategy gives us reason to believe that Dream Park will have quite a few friends queueing up to play when it launches in early October.

Will Wilson
Will Wilson
Will's obsession with gaming started off with sketching Laser Squad levels on pads of paper, but recently grew into violently shouting "Tango Down!" at random strangers on the street. He now directs that positive energy into his writing (due in no small part to a binding court order).