Our final visit for this trip was Fantasy Island for their Fear Island event. This event is extremely good value as it includes unlimited rides, a round of 18 hole mini golf, access to 4 scare mazes and a digipass for your ride photos too, all for £35!
I’ll start by saying that despite the good value, I didn’t feel like the scare mazes were left under funded or feeling tacky at all, quite the contrary actually! They were all well themed and had plenty of thrills and scares.
The first we tried was Scream Asylum and was set around the idea of urban explorers breaking into an abandoned asylum and getting caught by the old inmates!
This was a great start to the mazes as it was well themed and jumpy in places, but not over the top either. It did include a crawl space though so it isn’t suitable for everyone, but we managed just fine! Also unique to this scare maze was that it was so dark and you had to navigate it using a glow stick, which wasn’t very bright at all. This really added to it!
The next maze we did was Villa Voodoo. This sees you going through a swamp and finding a villa that appeared to be in the possession of Bwonsamdi, a Haitian voodoo deity who tries his best to keep you safe with his friends on the other side.
Themed mostly to a jungle, there was a really great standout part where you trudge through a swamp, using a mixture of lasers and smoke, it really did look like you were about to sink into a bog waist deep!
The final maze we tried was Blood Bunker. This was the only maze to feature physical effects which was a lift that takes you down to a labyrinth filled with tormented folk who are out to get you!
This featured some very claustrophobic areas and even a point where you are caged up and look to be unable to escape! I don’t suffer from claustrophobia so it didn’t affect me all that much, but I can imagine it would really terrify someone who does!
Besides the mazes, there’s also the chance to ride Millennium in the dark. This entails wearing a blindfold whilst riding and though a good idea in theory, the blindfold did let a bit of light through and you could make out where you were on the ride, so I just closed my eyes to get the same effect.
There was also a pirate show in the Pyramid and a circus show too but we were always doing something else during the showtimes so we missed those unfortunately.
Since this was our first visit this year, there was also 3 new rides to try out, The Guardian, Harrington Flint’s Island Adventure and Wild River Rapids.
I’ll start with Wild River Rapids. This is a road transportable version of the popular river rapids models you’ll see at Alton Towers and Thorpe Park but much smaller in scale.
The boats are much smaller and not quite as enclosed as modern rapids boats are but the ride still gives you all the feelings of its larger cousins. You’ll get a light sprinkling of water, and it even features a small drop. The best way to describe it is a much better version of Storm Surge at Thorpe Park, with river rapid elements.
Next up is Harrington Flint’s Island Adventure, which is a trackless interactive dark ride which features screens and physical props.
This was a great addition to the park, the guns work really well and the screens are excellent. There are only 2 small issues with this one. The first being that one of the screens tries to wrap around you using a pair of curves screens and they don’t quite match up. One is brighter than the other and it makes the divide very noticeable.
Secondly the physical elements you can shoot at are nice and all but they don’t add on to your score and are simply there for set dressing. Its a shame that they don’t add on to your score, but I’d rather it be like that than not have them at all!
Harrington Flint’s is definitely the best new ride this year which leads me onto The Guardian.
This ride is a robotic arm motion simulator with a large curves screens and takes you into a fantasy world to fight off malicious beasts that have come in from another dimension.
The queue line is excellently themed and the attraction features a preshow and this is where the problems start. If I’m being very critical, the CGI and acting are quite lacking here. Once you move into the ride room you’ll be sat down and over the shoulder restraints lowered and belted in place. You can’t do these yourself as the belts are too low to reach and requires the ride operator to do so.
Once you’re strapped in, the arm will lift you up into the air at a steep angle, your photo is taken and the ride rotates, facing you towards a large concaved white screen.
This is the second and biggest issue with the attraction as the screen quality and lighting is quite poor meaning you can’t really make out what’s going on properly. The ride also doesn’t tilt beyond 45 degrees too which was a shame as the over the shoulder restraints gave me the impression there would be a full 360 degree roll or something, but unfortunately not!
I do hope they can adjust the ride so it features a roll or two, and the screen/projector gets a little attention so the video is easier to see. I’d love to see the video get a bit more budget too so the CGI looks the part!
The idea is there, the ride looks great, it’s just let down by the video elements. It feels like a poor man’s Flight of the Sky Lion, an attraction I’m already critical of!
Besides the new rides, we had a go on Volcano, Rhombus Rocket, the Balloon Ride, Dragon Mountain Descent, Magical Seaquarium, Jungle Adventure, The Dodgems, The Odyssey, Go Karts and had a round of golf too.
As I mentioned in my Paultons Park blog, the Go Karts there weren’t the best, the ones at Fantasy Island are proper press and go go-karts. The track even has an F1 style overtaking section to make it feel like a proper racing track.
Though this was an upcharge and more expensive than Paultons Park, I much preferred these karts as they were faster, turned tighter and overall felt much more fun!
The other attraction I’d like to talk about is Odyssey. This is the parks Vekoma Suspended Looping Coaster (SLC), and usually that’s a cause for alarm, but not here!
The ride isn’t as smooth as Kumali, but even then it doesn’t smash your head about, and on this ride, neither of us had any issues at all! It’s also the world’s tallest SLC and would have been taller but complaints limited its size to what we see today.
Since our last visit which would have been last year now, they’ve introduced a digipass system to the ride wristbands at no additional cost. It also works differently to how other parks handle theirs as none of the rides feature a manned booth so you get your photos by pressing your band against an NFC reader.
This is a great idea, but some of the readers are behind Perspex screens that mean you can’t get the reader to read your wristband so some of the photos were unattainable. Rhombus Rockets screens were also so dark that you couldn’t make out who was who I’m the photos too.
I really like this idea though, as it not only adds additional value to your visit (as I love ride photos) but it also means you literally scan and go. It’s arguably better than iMagic at the Merlin properties, but iMagic definitely works better overall. Which I’d expect since you have to pay additionally for iMagic, where Fantasy Islands is included in your wristband price.
I hope they can sort out the little issues with the digipass system as it’s great that they’ve introduced and retrofitted the older rides with cameras, some are literally just DSLRs on sticks but it works!
Odyssey and Millennium don’t have them currently but I do recall my first ever ride on Odyssey having a camera on it, so maybe it’s something they can easily add back on?
Fear Island was a massive surprise to us as we weren’t expecting it to be quite as good as what it was. There were more scare mazes here than what Alton Towers put on for their 15th Anniversary, and though there wasn’t as much entertainment as what Towers had, there was more variety here.
We’ll definitely be returning to Fear Island next year to compare and contrast and I hope they do as good a job next year as they did this year. Excellent work Fantasy Island!
With that comes the conclusion of our holiday and a great end to a wonderful week! I’ll be doing a summary post next so look out for that!
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