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Frontier has been quietly cornering the market in theme park builders of late, with the likes of Coaster Crazy and Thrillville: Off The Rails - not forgetting, of course, the evergreen Rollercoaster Tycoon 3. Screamride, however, has the fingerprints of publisher Microsoft all over it. The fat-headed, projectile puking thrill-seekers of the developer's most recent efforts have been replaced by a series of gawky avatars and a robot narrator who sounds like the love child of GlaDOS and NintendoLand's Monita. These aren't ruinous changes, obviously, but they're part of a sterile, near-future aesthetic that saps some of the life from an otherwise solidly entertaining family game. It's most obvious in the Demolition Expert mode, one of three roles you'll adopt during your Screamride career. Here, you're asked to destroy a series of test facilities, usually by hurling a cabin from a giant rotating launcher, or occasionally firing a coaster car into them. The physics are perfectly robust, and the challenges come with plenty of wrinkles: bonus objectives might ask you to pass through three hoops, or to bounce off five trampolines while achieving a given points tally. There's strategy involved, too. Sometimes your targets will be blocked by indestructible barriers, or you'll have to topple structures like dominoes to score big. The act of launching can seem fiddly and awkward at first, but a generous degree of aftertouch allows you to correct wayward throws. The main issue is that none of it feels real. The facilities remind me of those ludicrously opulent hotels built on Dubai's artificial islands: they exist, yet they seem strangely impossible. The structures here don't really look like they ever housed anyone; they're just buildings designed to be demolished, and that's even clearer when your cabin crashes through the exterior and triggers a blast from some explosives hidden within. The extensive chain reaction that follows might look impressive, but you don't always feel like you had much to do with it.
That isn't always the case, and the best stages essentially turn you into a wrecking ball without the chain. And when you're given a winged coaster, you're encouraged to break the habit of a lifetime by not weaving between buildings but ploughing straight into them. So it's a pity that as you progress you'll find stages growing increasingly restrictive - limiting the speed of your throw forces you to take prescribed routes, bouncing from trampolines to giant magnets which allow you to take aim from a more favourable angle (which has the knock-on effect of making the initial launch feel less meaningful). It's all a little too clean and controlled, a corporate-approved brand of destruction that lacks the potency of its peers. The narration hardly helps - "structural integrity compromised" is a decidedly underwhelming way to celebrate the moment you collapsed a skyscraper onto a passing speedboat.
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