Words. Put them on paper and their combinations can be interesting, entertaining, drenched in sorrow or laugh-out-loud funny. With the time afforded by a writer to pour his or her words onto the page, their ability to communicate comes across far better than the writer is capable of in an average conversation.

Thrillville, on paper, is a stunning collection of ideas; it’s a theme-park management game in which you live within the world of your park, talk to your customers, satisfy their needs, build new rides, play dozens of fun mini-games and take on missions. On paper, Thrillville should be the most entertaining piece of software ever devised, but pick it up and play it for an extended period and you’ll quickly realise that, like so many socially reserved writers, it just doesn’t communicate in real time like it does on the page.

This type of game has been around since the Stone Age, but Thrillville pushes many boundaries in its attempts to avoid the inevitable pigeonholing thrown at it from those who’ve played Theme Park and/or any of the RollerCoaster Tycoon series. Unlike those games, LucasArt’s amusementpark adventure won’t force closure of your park because you forgot to build a toilet or because you haven’t employed enough janitors to keep the place free of stray burger buns. In fact, Thrillville doesn’t force you to do anything; sit and do nothing and time will pass, but, while your theme park isn’t going to be topping the charts, it won’t come crumbling down around your ears either. It’s a nifty approach. No one really wants to be spending their time in a game rearranging placement of the gents so that their clientele don’t soil themselves, because let’s face it, where’s the fun in that? But it’s a difficult balance to master – without the worry that everything may go tits up at any time, your reason for existing in the game world loses some degree of focus.

The single-player game is your typical everyday, ho-hum, run-of-the-mill sandbox, resource-management partygame, rollercoaster-building simulation. Once you’ve selected an appropriate avatar for yourself, the game’s tutorials kick in, offering you lessons on missions, chatting with punters, playing mini-games and building new rides. With this out of the way, you’re free to explore your fiefdom of fun in any way you think is appropriate. We couldn’t help ourselves – the ONLY thing on our minds, given free run of the park, was to build the biggest and baddest rollercoaster in Christendom. Coaster building is insanely easy, allowing you to essentially drive the track in any direction you wish, with the only tricky part being joining each end to create a circuit. Frontier has thought of this, though, and has included a handy auto-finisher to save you the bother of correctly lining up your white-knuckle masterpiece. It’s great fun the first time you do it and riding your creation is a blast, but we were amazed at how quickly coaster building became a chore; it’s something that everyone needs to do once, but just not something that stands up well to repetition.

As well as all of your standard theme-park rides and attractions there’s also some top-notch (and multiplayer) arcade games on offer here. With around 40 different games, you’ll certainly not be short of things to do, with anything from ‘Event Horizon 2’ (an outstanding R-Type clone) to ‘Saucer Sumo’ (a multiplayer push and shove game). One of our personal favourites was ‘Bandito Chinchilla’, a kind of cross between Viewtiful Joe, Double Dragon and Ren & Stimpy. It sounds mad, we know, but in practice it’s nothing short of hilarious. And it’s these mini-games, especially if you have some extra bodies and a few spare pads lying around, that rescue Thrillville from the mirthlessly mundane. When you consider that many of these are equal or better than anything that Xbox Live Arcade has to offer, you’ll be getting far more game here than a penny under £40 has any right to buy you.

It’s not all magical mini-game merriment, though. Thrillville has a few issues that you should know about. Visually, and despite the obvious nod to a more cartoon stylee, it is a bit of a letdown. Even a game of this type has no excuses for looking like it’s running on last-gen gear and yet there are no apologies made for it looking as basic as it does. If you’re looking for a stunning next-gen (read: current-gen) theme park, then you won’t find it here. Finally, as alluded to earlier, the single-player game is just the wrong side of dreary and repetitious. Perhaps it’s for this reason that the developer has attempted to jazz it up by including chat missions and collectables, but the conversations on offer are far too saccharine, dull and pointless and the collectables are just erm… collectable.

Dan Howdle