Previews

Hands on with PSP Thrillville: Off the Rails

Keep your arms and legs inside the car for our exclusive look at LucasArts' amusing theme park sim sequel

Hands on with PSP Thrillville: Off the Rails

With autumn in full swing, trips to the amusement park are less of an attractive idea than warming up at home to a new game and a cup of cocoa.

And what better game than Thrillville: Off the Rails to provide a suitable replacement to running around a rainy theme park. After getting time with a near-final version of the game, we're confident it'll provide plenty of indoor amusement with its rollercoasters and slew of mini-games (cocoa isn't included, though).

Off the Rails, sequel to likeable but flawed original game from earlier this year, puts your at the helm of five Thrillville theme parks: Stunts, Otherworlds, Explorer, Giant, and Holidays. Each park possesses three individually themed areas that can be developed with unique rides.

For instance, Scurvyville in the adventurous Thrillville Explorer amusement park offers a space to build pirate-related attractions. There's an amazing amount to see and it's so well-presented that simply walking around one of the parks is entertaining in itself.

Your overall task is to increase patronage by completing missions that reward experience and raise your park management level. Objectives include constructing original rollercoasters, challenging guests to mini-games, and talking to customers to ensure they're happy. There's hours worth of enjoyment to be had playing the nearly three dozen mini-games, ranging from R-Type parody 'Event Horizon', to classic bumper cars, to the hilariously stereotypical side-scrolling beat-'em-up 'Bandito Chinchilla'.

However, the real attraction is coaster building. You can pony up for a prefabricated roller coaster or build one from scratch. Naturally, constructing a coaster yourself is far more entertaining than selecting from a rather short list of pre-designed rides. Additionally, coaster-related missions have specific requirements – certain length, number of drops, loops, etc – that can only be met by building the ride yourself.

It's remarkably easy to lay down track using the D-pad to set height and direction. Pressing up/down raises or lowers the track, whereas various grades of turns are set with left/right. Turns can even be banked, which reduces the chances that your park guests will feel sick – holding down the Square button and hitting L/R banks the track in the corresponding direction.

You can create an entire coasters of turns and dips, but the real fun comes with special 'whoa' pieces. These unique parts add thrill value to your coaster, ranging from loops, to a ring of fire, to inverted drops. Just short of three dozen different whoa pieces are included in the game, which are accessed via a radial menu mapped to the L button. The list of available pieces depends on the type of coaster you're building. However, judging from the handful of coasters we've built there's usually around six to eight different whoa parts offered per category.

Designing a coaster isn't the end of it – you need to trick it out to make it shine. Full customization options are available for painting each part of a ride, setting the number of cars, and even adjusting the ticket price. But if micromanaging a coaster isn't your thing, Off the Rails includes a track assist function that sees one tap of the R button automatically complete a half-finished coaster.

Build a particularly awesome rollercoaster and you're welcome to share it with other players. Infrastructure coaster swapping won't being making the Off the Rails features docket, but there's plenty of support for ad-hoc track sharing and mini-game competition. Most of the mini-games featured in the campaign can be played with up to three friends. Even if none of them are particularly original or long-lasting, the sheer number of offerings promises a fun distraction at the very least.

Indeed, we're suitably impressed with regards to the wealth of content Off the Rails will offer when it ships later this month. While much of it comes from its substantial slate of mini-games, they're awfully charming and fun to play. Paired with intuitive rollercoaster construction, LucasArts could have a real winner on its hands.

We'll have more in our review in the coming weeks, so click 'Track It!' to get to read our final assessment.

Tracy Erickson
Tracy Erickson
Manning our editorial outpost in America, Tracy comes with years of expertise at mashing a keyboard. When he's not out painting the town red, he jets across the home of the brave, covering press events under the Pocket Gamer banner.