Upon first glance, it would be easy to pass off Frontier's latest theme park-building management game, Thrillville, as a kid's version of its amusement park-management series, RollerCoaster Tycoon. Thrillville does not offer anywhere near the depth or complexity of the Tycoon series in terms of micromanaging resources to maximize profits and attract large crowds, and its presentation takes a page more out of Psychonauts' book than anything Will Wright would dream up. However, instead of targeting the niche business-management crowd with more of the same, or dumbing down the product for an equally niche children's market, Frontier seems to be going after more-casual players, by focusing more on easy-to-pick-up yet often surprisingly complex minigames, and by wrapping the experience up in a nicely put-together package.
Thrillville is better categorized as a compilation of minigames than a business-management sim or amusement-park builder, but it does have many elements of those two genres. You can choose to dive right into these minigames by yourself, or join a few friends in party play mode. One of the many excellent design choices that Frontier makes in Thrillville is that you'll find all of the 20-plus minigames ready to play here, save for a very select few that can be unlocked by playing through portions of the single-player mode. The amusement-park theme of Thrillville is reflected in nearly all of the minigames. For instance, you'll be able to pop cork guns off in themed shooting galleries, zip around custom-built go-kart tracks, get your bump on with bumper cars, and so on.
What separates these games from the garden variety toss-away minigames that are often haphazardly shoehorned into other action adventure games is that they are all reasonably complex and control very well. For example, the shooting minigames contain many of the elements of a bona fide first-person shooter. If you shoot that jack-o'-lantern-headed scarecrow in its big pumpkin noggin, it'll immediately keel over and you'll reap the maximum amount of points. Also, cork-gunning those robots or scarecrows in vital areas such as the abdomen will score you more points than just blasting off their arms, which, incidentally, do fall off if you hit them. And these enemies are even smart enough to crouch and shoot around corners to evade your shots. Furthermore, scattered about these levels are several different gun types, such as double pistols, machine guns, and the like, as well as five fairly well dispersed treasure pickups to boost your score. Nearly all of the other minigames offer similarly layered gameplay that greatly ramps up their fun factor.
