Changa
Mega Poster
Thorpe Park is back open! Unfortunately the rides didn't quite seem to be ready to start a new season as our day was mostly spent navigating around breakdowns. Please enjoy my thoughts, along with the mediocre pics of Hyperia from around the park!
Storm surge - 6/10
It's a fun filler ride that is unfortunately let down by how unsightly it is in its current position. The only way to get particularly wet was the 2 inches of water in the raft itself.
Dodgems - 6/10
Their cycle time is remarkably short, but dodgems are always good fun when you have other mates to target. The de-birdifying of the area in general looks quite nice, and the dodgems benefitted particularly well from the refresh.
Stealth- 9/10
Good god, the launch and pull-up are just insane. We were very lucky in catching a short queue after the ride reopened, and it was just as intense and relentless as it's always been.
Nemesis inferno - 8/10
Just like Stealth, Nemesis inferno is just as reliably intense as it's always been. Despite getting caught in a hailstorm that closed the ride for 30 mins, it was still worth the extra queue for the front row.
(There seems to have been a fury-esque support repair done at some point on the Zero-G roll?)
Now, after 8 years of trying to get on each iteration of thorpe park's dark horse and mostly refraining from spoilers on what was supposed to be a revolutionary attraction. We finally managed to catch a ride on....
Ghost train - 1/10
Good god, what a complete failure of a ride. After a 20 minute posted queue ended up being an hour thanks to is pitiful capacity. We enter one decent preshow, a second preshow of just a fake weather channel for 5 minutes, get onto the no-longer floating train (nothing beats a brick-painted board posted over your standout effect that you spent a fortune on achieving), and run through a 20 minute "experience" that (imo) consists of three rubbish parts that's fail to cover together in any way. It was boring, cringey, and fascinating to wonder how this ever got approved and how they managed to waste so much money on such a naff concept. I wasn't expecting much from the ride given how infamous it's reputation is. But it was somehow much worse, and wouldn't be worth a walk-on ride, let alone the 90 minutes we wasted in total. Why was it so expensive? Why was it designed to need so many staff members? Why does it break down so much when there's such little to it? (Probably staff I guess?) How did they think it would work out?
(EDIT:Looking at the ride's behind-the-scenes. It seems incredibly complicated for the experience you get out of it. I can't really understand why they designed it this way though.)
Having said all of this. I'm delighted to have finally ridden it, and I can finally look into the details of how this came to be. The 1 point is for the actor's efforts, and it managing to feel larger than the building it's in.
Walking dead - 6/10
It's so much better than the above. It's a perfectly fine ride with aunt pretty decent theming, so makes for a fun experience that first what it needs to without seeing the world alight. All I would ask for is for them to turn down the train horn in the indoor queue as it makes that 10 minutes absolutely miserable.
-General Thoughts-
The refreshes were all positive from what I saw. Colossus' track repaint looks particularly lovely, the buildings are mostly nice, I'm not much of a fan of quite how vibrant the colours are, but I believe that they have painted this deliberately with the expectation that they'd fade into a more pleasing colour than they were before. I hope that they carry on with the rest of the park as it's made areas like tidal wave look particularly tired in comparison.
Hyperia is looking absolutely incredible. It's imposing from almost every point in the park and makes the previously intimidating-looking SAW look like a family ride by comparison. The golden "styling" of the station and neighbouring buildings look very modern and it's really shaping up to be a lovely area. If really looked like Thorpe Park have a slam dunk on their hands, and I think they have set a high bar to meet with future projects in terms of the perceived scale of investment.
Sadly the operations today we're some of the worst I've experienced. Samurai isn't even close to reopening anytime soon. The major rides were constantly breaking down, with typically at least two of the six major coasters being down at any one time, and one half hour period where four of the six coasters were down. That coupled with quite a few all day closures (rumba & vortex), and sporadic operations of all the other fillers attractions, meant that most of the park were being funneled into only a couple of attractions, vastly inflating their wait times. Hopefully this was just an opening day teething issue and not a sign of the year to come.
Storm surge - 6/10
It's a fun filler ride that is unfortunately let down by how unsightly it is in its current position. The only way to get particularly wet was the 2 inches of water in the raft itself.
Dodgems - 6/10
Their cycle time is remarkably short, but dodgems are always good fun when you have other mates to target. The de-birdifying of the area in general looks quite nice, and the dodgems benefitted particularly well from the refresh.
Stealth- 9/10
Good god, the launch and pull-up are just insane. We were very lucky in catching a short queue after the ride reopened, and it was just as intense and relentless as it's always been.
Nemesis inferno - 8/10
Just like Stealth, Nemesis inferno is just as reliably intense as it's always been. Despite getting caught in a hailstorm that closed the ride for 30 mins, it was still worth the extra queue for the front row.
(There seems to have been a fury-esque support repair done at some point on the Zero-G roll?)
Now, after 8 years of trying to get on each iteration of thorpe park's dark horse and mostly refraining from spoilers on what was supposed to be a revolutionary attraction. We finally managed to catch a ride on....
Ghost train - 1/10
Good god, what a complete failure of a ride. After a 20 minute posted queue ended up being an hour thanks to is pitiful capacity. We enter one decent preshow, a second preshow of just a fake weather channel for 5 minutes, get onto the no-longer floating train (nothing beats a brick-painted board posted over your standout effect that you spent a fortune on achieving), and run through a 20 minute "experience" that (imo) consists of three rubbish parts that's fail to cover together in any way. It was boring, cringey, and fascinating to wonder how this ever got approved and how they managed to waste so much money on such a naff concept. I wasn't expecting much from the ride given how infamous it's reputation is. But it was somehow much worse, and wouldn't be worth a walk-on ride, let alone the 90 minutes we wasted in total. Why was it so expensive? Why was it designed to need so many staff members? Why does it break down so much when there's such little to it? (Probably staff I guess?) How did they think it would work out?
(EDIT:Looking at the ride's behind-the-scenes. It seems incredibly complicated for the experience you get out of it. I can't really understand why they designed it this way though.)
Having said all of this. I'm delighted to have finally ridden it, and I can finally look into the details of how this came to be. The 1 point is for the actor's efforts, and it managing to feel larger than the building it's in.
Walking dead - 6/10
It's so much better than the above. It's a perfectly fine ride with aunt pretty decent theming, so makes for a fun experience that first what it needs to without seeing the world alight. All I would ask for is for them to turn down the train horn in the indoor queue as it makes that 10 minutes absolutely miserable.
-General Thoughts-
The refreshes were all positive from what I saw. Colossus' track repaint looks particularly lovely, the buildings are mostly nice, I'm not much of a fan of quite how vibrant the colours are, but I believe that they have painted this deliberately with the expectation that they'd fade into a more pleasing colour than they were before. I hope that they carry on with the rest of the park as it's made areas like tidal wave look particularly tired in comparison.
Hyperia is looking absolutely incredible. It's imposing from almost every point in the park and makes the previously intimidating-looking SAW look like a family ride by comparison. The golden "styling" of the station and neighbouring buildings look very modern and it's really shaping up to be a lovely area. If really looked like Thorpe Park have a slam dunk on their hands, and I think they have set a high bar to meet with future projects in terms of the perceived scale of investment.
Sadly the operations today we're some of the worst I've experienced. Samurai isn't even close to reopening anytime soon. The major rides were constantly breaking down, with typically at least two of the six major coasters being down at any one time, and one half hour period where four of the six coasters were down. That coupled with quite a few all day closures (rumba & vortex), and sporadic operations of all the other fillers attractions, meant that most of the park were being funneled into only a couple of attractions, vastly inflating their wait times. Hopefully this was just an opening day teething issue and not a sign of the year to come.
Last edited: