In a normal world, the things you do in ScreamRide would be deemed insane. But at Screamworks — a fictional facility designed to provide backstory for the chaotic destruction and ingenious creations you’ll partake in during the campaign — it’s all welcomed.
At the most basic level, ScreamRide is about coaster construction and building destruction. It’s funny, but for as simple as that sounds (and is, really), Frontier Developments has actually created a pretty entertaining game that leverages an incredible physics and destruction engine to accomplish some pretty amazing things.
ScreamRide is incredibly straightforward. There’s a main campaign mode, comprised of three very distinct “jobs,” and a sandbox mode in which you are free to build whatever you want — within the confines of the game’s premise, that is.
Starting with the campaign, because you’ll actually need to play through it to unlock enough tools and items to make the sandbox mode worth it, you can select any of the three jobs: ScreamRider, Demolition Expert, and Engineer.
Surprisingly, ScreamRider was actually my favorite of the three. In it, you actually play as the riders on the coaster. Gameplay is that of an arcade-style racer in which you’ll zoom along a series of coaster tracks, boosting and breaking through hairpin turns, giant loops, and zany corkscrews. As you progress through the various stages, ScreamRider throws more obstacles in your way like gaps in track, missing rails, or debris that you must avoid by tilting the cart. You’ll have to be careful, though, because an over adjustment at any point could send your coaster derailing and its passengers flying. The good news is that there’s not much of a penalty for doing this; the car just resets on the track with maybe a little nick in your overall score for the level. You might also lose out on some bonus objectives, but that’s about it. Frontier does a really great job in having you embrace your mistakes by usually rewarding you with some awesome destruction sequence, so even if you “fail” it doesn’t feel like that.
Demolition Expert was my least favorite of the three modes. In this mode, as the name suggests, you’re tasked with, well, destroying things. You’re given a specific number of “cabins” — various types, each with unique abilities — to launch at buildings. Again, there are bonus goals to achieve here, like launching cabins through hoops, but the ultimate goal is to just cause as much destruction as possible to rack up points. It’s not that watching destruction wasn’t fun — that part was my favorite — but the angles in which you’re to launch these cabins from are horrendous. There’s a line that estimates where your cabin will launch, but it’s hard to gage how much power to put behind your launch for distance or how much height you’ll need. It’s mostly trial by error, which I wasn’t a big fan of. Again though, it’s hard to get too upset since there’s little consequence for “failing.” At the end of the day, you’re still watching towers crumble and you’re just a button away from starting over again.
The last job in the campaign is Engineer. In this, you’re tasked with building your own rollercoaster to meet certain criteria. Depending on the stage you’re at, this can vary drastically, but can include things like maintaining a certain speed or managing the G-Force intensity. Frontier does a good job scaling the levels appropriately, though, introducing new tools are to you over time. For the most part, this job is pretty straightfoward, teaching you the basics of what you need to know should you want to participate in the sandbox mode. Like Demolition Expert, awkward camera angles can sometimes make building the track and connecting pieces difficult.
Aside from teaching you the fundamentals of the game, there’s not much purpose to the campaign. Still, you’re practically forced to play it because locked behind these various stages are all sorts of creative objects you’ll need to get the most out of sandbox mode. The good thing is that, for the most part, the campaign is welcoming. The difficulty doesn’t really ramp up until the last final stages. Goals are easily met and bonus challenges aren’t a requirement to pass, though they do provide some nice replay value if you’re a completionist. A leaderboard at the end of every stage might also convince you to go back and replay a specific level.
Of course, for fans of the Rollercoaster Tycoon series — which I imagine is what inspired ScreamRide — you’ll likely find home in the sandbox mode where you can really let your creative juices flow. The sandbox allows you to make any of the three kinds of levels from the campaign. There are a ton of options to choose from, which I personally found to be a bit overwhelming. For those more advanced or experienced with creation-type games, you’ll probably have little trouble navigating the menus of the sandbox, but I found it to be a bit complex. Like the other modes, sandbox can suffer at times from awkward camera angles, but it’s nothing you can’t overcome.
Once you complete your creation, you’re able to upload it and share it with the rest of the ScreamRide community. Surprisingly, the community is already very active in uploading their creations, and I’ve played some pretty awesome designs so far. I’m one of those players who enjoy seeing what people way more creative and talented than me can come up with, so I spent more of my time playing and less creating. I swear, some of the things people can come up with — I don’t know how they do it.
In the end, ScreamRide was a pleasant surprise for me. As a fan of the Rollercoaster Tycoon series, it was a nice change to create something without having to worry about all the park management aspects that might come with it. Sometimes you just want to build, or destroy; ScreamRide lets you do both.
