Home

 › 

Articles

 › 

Six Flags Fun Park Review for Nintendo Wii

Six Flags Fun Park Review for Nintendo Wii

It’s a family-friendly collection of carnival mini-games for the Wii. The game wasn’t developed with the intention of representing a Six Flags amusement park, but said license got slapped on at the end. For a limited time, purchasers get a free child’s ticket to a Six Flags park, even though the game is only $20 and a kid’s ticket usually costs more than that. The original publisher, Brash Entertainment, is out of business. You see where this is going: this game is awful.

Six Flags Fun Park screenshot

There are two ways to play: the multiplayer Vs. mode and the single-player adventure. The multiplayer is definitely where it’s at, not only because you get to suffer with a friend but because 24 of the 33 total multiplayer games are unlocked right from the start. The games test a variety of Wii-mote techniques, from pointer speed to waggle timing. Players take turns, rather than playing simultaneously, in the majority of them.

There are three main issues with these games. The first is that many of them are simple variations on each other. For example, there are several button-mashing rail-shooter stages on roller coasters, several whack-a-mole-type games where you press a D-pad button to select a hole and then swing to hit, several fishing stages, several bowling-inspired stages, and several shooting games where you fire from a cannon without even a reticule to help you aim.

You read that right: some of the shooting games don’t even have aiming reticules, forcing you to adjust your Wii-mote pointing based on where the last shot went. This brings us to problem number two: many of the games don’t quite get the waggling right. A few of the games are based on those irritating arcade machines that make you control a claw to catch prizes, for example, except that instead of a joystick you get to hold your Wii-mote vertically and tilt it around. No, there’s no Nunchuck compatibility (more complaints on that in a bit). Many of the other games’ controls just seem oversensitive. It’s hard to believe a young child, without fully developed hand-eye coordination, is expected to pull some of this stuff off.

Six Flags Fun Park screenshot

The third problem is that the games simply aren’t that much fun. Between the controls being iffy and the fact that it seems completely random how many points you get for different actions, it’s often a surprise to see who won at the end. Not a single game here managed to hold our attention beyond a few tries, and most of them we’d have given up on earlier were we not responsible for writing this review.

Six Flags Fun Park screenshot

One final note about multiplayer: Xeno Xtraction is downright disturbing. It’s a take-off on the board game Operation, the goal being to grab what is apparently a monster egg with the Wii-mote pointer, and then guide it through the maze that is your young boy patient’s intestines. Meanwhile, the poor kid sobs, and cries out whenever you brush against his organs. If you hit the egg off too many things before getting it out (very likely on the first few tries), the baby mauler breaks out with a frightening noise. We guess that’s where the 㥶+” in the rating comes from.

Six Flags Fun Park screenshot

If multiplayer isn’t your thing, you can try the single-player adventure. The first thing you’ll notice is that you can’t steer your character around the screen; rather, you have to click the spot on the screen where you want him to go with the A button. It’s understandable they wanted the game to work for Wii owners who somehow never invested in a Nunchuk, but couldn’t they have made it so that people who do have Nunchuks can steer normally?

In the adventure, you’re given a fairly large world to explore, in which you accomplish very simple tasks for a variety of people (it’s kind of like Grand Theft Auto for pre-schoolers). Your goals are to unlock as much of the park as possible, and to accumulate coins and tickets (for some reason, the Six Flags video game universe has two forms of currency). Sometimes your tasks will involve playing the various mini-games, but other times you’re charged with mundane chores like picking up trash and planting seeds. If that’s what your kid wants to do, why not take him away from the Wii and send him to the garden? The reason we play video games is that we get to do things virtually we couldn’t do in real life. All in all, the single-player mode demands too much boredom in between the games (which are, of course, mostly the same games from the multiplayer; there are more than 40 total in the whole game).

The presentation is the one thing this game has going for it. The graphics are pretty threadbare, but they work, and it’s easy to imagine a kid going ga-ga over the various costumes you can unlock for your character. The game’s inhabitants discourse in what’s apparently a gibberish language, but the English text is surprisingly well-written and sometimes even funny. The sounds are amusing and dramatic, save for the aforementioned Xeno Xtraction torture scene.

In short, pass on Six Flags Fun Park. There are better Wii games out there for kids and fans of casual entertainment. At least, there must be, somewhere.

RATING OUT OF 5 RATING DESCRIPTION 3.2 Graphics
There’s nothing impressive, but they’re kind of cute. 2.0 Control
There’s no Nunchuk compatibility where it’s sorely needed, and it’s hard to get some of the mini-games to work right. 3.9 Music / Sound FX / Voice Acting
Well-done sound effects, though the voiceovers are, for some reason, spoken in what’s apparently a gibberish language. 2.4

Play Value
Games are hard to control, repetitive, and not very fun. Single-player mode is tedious. Play value is how much the game has to offer, not just replayability.

2.4 Overall Rating – Poor
Not an average. See Rating legend above for a final score breakdown.

Game Features:

  • Over 40 mini-games to play with friends and family.
  • Create your character and accessorize him or her by winning or trading for accessories.
  • Win tickets and prizes for more rides and fun.
  • Wii-mote interactions.
  • Explore a living park and unlock different sub worlds within it.

  • To top