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- Reviewed on: 11/18/2008
- Released on: 10/30/2008
- Originally published on GameSpot: Goosebumps HorrorLand (Wii) Review
The HorrorLand theme park has been a fixture of writer R.L. Stine's Goosebumps books since its first appearance in 1994's One Day at HorrorLand. Since then, "the scariest place on Earth" has been featured in numerous Goosebumps books, as well as a board game and a 1996 PC game, but Goosebumps HorrorLand on the Wii almost certainly represents the most bone-chilling, hair-raising, terrifying depiction of the park to date. The controls in this horror-themed minigame collection are so bad, it's scary!
HorrorLand starts by having you choose a young boy or girl as your character, and then kicks things off with you and a friend mysteriously finding tickets to the park. Upon your arrival, your tickets are torn into pieces by the green-skinned horror at the entrance, and you and your friend are quickly separated. It soon becomes clear that the only way you'll escape from HorrorLand is by finding all the pieces of your ticket, which are scattered across the park's five areas. And to do that, you've unfortunately got to ride the rides and play the parlor games that make up HorrorLand's attractions.
Each of the park's five themed areas has six attractions, for a total of 30 minigames, though most of them are just slight variations on each other. To the game's credit, a few of them can be fun for a little while. For instance, there are some bumper-car games in which your goal is to destroy the other cars by ramming into them. You use the Wii Remote to steer, as well as to trigger bursts of speed, and these control well and are entertaining for a few minutes. But you've got to take the bad with the good in HorrorLand, and the bad is very, very bad.
It's not possible to get through the game playing only the more passable attractions, because getting into each successive area requires you to have a certain number of frights. You earn frights based on your performance in each game: a bronze-level performance nets you one, a silver two, and a gold three. Getting into the last area of the park requires you to have 50 frights, so you'll need to have earned at least a silver on most of the attractions to reach that point. It's surprisingly difficult to earn silver in a fair number of the attractions, and by the time you do, you'll likely have played even the more enjoyable minigames enough times that you'll be tired of them. But that's far from the worst that HorrorLand has to offer.
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