Theme Park review

Theme Park is all about money. Your customers carry enough spending cash to buy five duck shoots and a couple of burger vans of their own, so the only way to protect your business is to relieve them of as much cash as possible before they wise up and start a dodgy fun fair by themselves.

To begin with, you draw a few footpaths - because the theme in this park is concrete - and open the turnstiles. Before you’ve even built a single attraction, everyone will be forking out their hard-earned to admire your pavement-laying skills. Then you place the odd bouncy castle and teacup ride around the place - filling in the gaps with fast food stalls - ramp up the price of everything according to the hints the game keeps dishing out, and wait until you’re rich.

Well, that’s how we thought it would work. We kept on thinking it, too, even while the business was hemorrhaging money, because no matter how much we charged for the experience, the queues were always huge and the vomit laid on the pathways in carroty abundance.

As it turns out, there’s a lot more to the game than simply sitting and watching - as you’ll be aware if you’ve played any of the other versions of this strategy classic. The level of micro-management can be intense, depending on the difficulty setting. At its most basic, new attractions become available to purchase at regular intervals, and you just plunk them wherever you like. The middle setting requires you to spend money on research even if you just want a snack shop or something slightly more exciting than a hedge maze, while the most advanced option puts you in charge of ordering supplies and negotiating with unions.