Peers in seemingly disparate genres have assumed mastery over impulsive tests of skill, the strategic obliteration of unreliable architecture, and a judicious regard for practical engineering, but none have been arranged together as uniform and effective as ScreamRide. For a game so persistently engrossed in outlandish destruction, its accompanying structure is surprisingly sound.
ScreamRide’s resourceful infrastructure extends its talents to a variety of exercises, but it’s best to start with the one that provides the most tangible and immediate feedback. “ScreamRider” lists a series of levels that challenge the player with riding the living shit out of a rollercoaster and coming to terms with the physics-based repercussions acquired along the way. This primarily involves maintaining a reasonable amount of control to ensure the coaster doesn’t succumb to the oppressive force of accelerated gravity, but also involves going as fast as possible because (1) it looks cool, (2) there’s a nice sensation of momentum, and (3) at its heart, ScreamRider is a score-attack mode with time as a primary obstacle.
Vanilla shrieking transit isn’t all the ScreamRider campaign has to offer; a few superficial mechanics are added to supplement its challenges. Kind of like Gears of War’s active reload mechanic, a turbo meter is filled by pressing a button at the end of a blue-outlined part of the normal course. The nearer to the end of the track it’s engaged, the better the allotted turbo (and point reward). With sufficient progression you’ll also surely encounter a series of obstacles, including but not limited to barriers on one side of the track and entire sections of either side of the track completely missing. Ideally you’re intended to exert enough force toward either side to briefly lift one side of your coaster, but finding the sweet spot between a careful glide and a total wreck becomes a test of skill.
ScreamRider prefers you to complete a race without ever derailing your coaster. Not only is it a significant extraneous point bonus, but without any penalizing track resets it greatly benefits your overall time. For 90% of ScreamRider’s courses, I accomplished this with moderate practice. The game is hard, but it’s fair about its difficulty. Physics will literally flip you off course at a moment’s notice just like a tiger will naturally eat a bucket of fresh horse meat. It’s just what happens naturally. This will inevitably result in moments of white-knuckled rage, but dealing with such adversity is part of the experience. Like Super Meat Boy or the Trials games, you can crash and fail your way through and (probably) complete the course, but allowing yourself the time and patience to get wrapped up in its finer details is closer to ScreamRide’s intentions. The pure pursuit of perfection is its proper call to adventure.
At this point ScreamRide sort of feels like a $15 or $20 game. Its six levels and twenty or so courses between them are good for a half-dozen hours of content, and even more if you’re dedicated to completing bonus objectives and earning a full five stars. Raised eyebrows emerge from a $40 price tag, at least until it’s revealed that racing through courses is only a third of what ScreamRide has to offer. “Demolition Expert,” and “Engineer” modes are functionally separate campaigns, each with their own corresponding suite of levels and disparate set of mechanics, and they’re what help build ScreamRide into an attractive package.
If Trials was a close comparison to the action-y ScreamRider mode, Angry Birds and Boom Blox feel like an influence on Demolition Expert. In this campaign, people are loaded into a spherical cabin and then discriminately hurled at surrounding architecture. The machine amusement ride behind this flings objects in a circular motion, which requires a bit of technique, and its velocity can typically be adjusted. Early on this just seems like a clever way to knock things down and can feel more like an obtuse pitching simulator; strategy appears to be limited to seeking out and targeting red-colored explosive barrels for maximum destruction.
Like ScreamRide’s other modes, Demolition Expert is quick to reveal additional challenges worthy of consideration. Your cabin selection expands to spheres that have a greater degree of mid-air control, one that bounces for a while upon impact, one that comes with explosives attached, and another that separates into three pieces (I still have no idea why). Other challenges, like throwing the cabins through hoops, off trampolines, in between field goals, or into magnetized launchers are also quickly available. Sometimes Demolition Expert substitutes the spherical cabins for something that looks like Luke Skywalkers’s landspeeder, albeit outfitted with requisite single-use engines, flimsy wings, or explosives. Through any application, it’s fun to hurl a series of objects into large buildings.
Where Demolition Expert thrives is through its self-imposed limitations. The number of available cabins and cabin types is limited, and eventually the strength of throw is severely restricted. This encourages creativity in the mind of the player, forcing them to devise and organize an efficient plan of attack. In later levels I was spending hours trying to find the perfect course of action. Sometimes this revealed tiny secrets, like switch-activated catapults buried inside other structures or hidden caches of explosives. Other times I would nail nine of ten throws, reign down destruction upon almost everything around me, and the goof the last ball and force myself to start over (obviously I got a bit obsessive about executing my plans properly).
There’s an incredible sense of satisfaction organizing and executing a proper round of Demolition Expert. Seeing a tiny target off in the distance, one that I have to bounce a ball off of a trampoline, pass through a target, and finally connecting with a five-prong explosive trigger, and reliably nailing it with pinpoint precision is one of ScreamRide’s more rewarding facets. Replicating that sensation across an entire level, especially later levels that demand repeated perfection, is equally engrossing.
Engineer is ScreamRide’s third campaign, and it’s the toughest nut to crack – at least to those who are more used to the immediate feedback provided by success and failure in the other two campaigns. Engineer, in short order, tasks the player with laying out a roller coaster track that meets certain predefined directives. Sometimes this means connecting a series of preexisting track across an otherwise empty field. Other times it means starting from scratch and trying to reach a desired track length, creating a number of inversions, or staying under a certain level of nausea. All kinds of meters and gauges relay the effects of whatever mad scientist ride you’re prepared to build, but the general rule is you should, at the very least, connect the starting point to the end point.
Setting out and building tracks is a cumbersome process, albeit one that becomes much easier with experience. Short stacks of base track and be connected and twisted to suit whatever turn (and accompanying g-force) you may need. Prefabricated loops, hairpin turns, spiral turns, and countless other pre-made pieces are also available, but usually in a limited supply. Issues start to arise when you can’t quite find a convenient and quick camera angle to properly evaluate your work, which can lead to a significant amount of frustration. Mounting complete 3D camera control to the right analog stick was likely the only workable solution, but that doesn’t make it a good one.
I found Engineer, even more so than ScreamRider and Demolition Expert, to be reliant on a personal need for efficiency alongside requisite trial-and-error. ScreamRide understands this and lets you test your track at any stage of completion with relative quickness, ensuring you can iron out individual inconsistencies before they transition into a wrecked track with twenty different problems. After a test run, it’ll even point out specific points where errors, like ejecting riders or extreme g’s, occurred. Crafting a coaster that met all of requirement and allowed all of its passengers to survive until the end was usually a challenge – and having finite goals to hit, rather than a completely open suite of tools, always made it interesting.
If there’s one area where Engineer fails, it’s in challenges designed to specifically wreck the coaster. The entire notion of an ejector seat is funny, but I couldn’t ever get a handle on it in practice. It was weirdly inconsistent, launching passengers into explosive barrels only sometimes, and debatably effective at anything else. Other destruction missions, which typically amount to employing a ton of turbo boosters and making a veritable rocket launcher, felt less about strategy and more toward brute force feats of domino destruction. There’s an appeal there, sure, but its lackadaisical approach felt antithetical to the rest of what ScreamRide has to offer.
ScreamRide also offers a healthy sandbox mode for a less restricted take on coaster and amusement ride building. I used my time there to build a crude approximation of the Euthanasia Coaster and called it a day, but I can see the appeal for construction obsessives or anyone interesting in going deeper than the standard Engineer campaign. At present time (admittedly well before ScreamRide’s release) there only a handful of user-created levels available, but they’re a good crop. People seem to have an appreciable insistence on speed, rocketing me through courses faster than anything in the proper game. There were also a handful of dick-shaped coasters but, well, that’s user-created content.
Several measurable aspects of ScreamRide allow it to perform past its mechanical limitations. First, and most obviously, is how well everything – everything – falls apart. Not since Red Faction: Guerrilla has a game been so dependent on systematic player-authored obliteration. Taking out a tiny support structure and watching, waiting, and hoping for the whole thing to collapse and tumble down is tremendously satisfying. It’s even better when a crumbling edifice cascades into another building, setting off a chain reaction of destruction. Even in modes that aren’t specifically designed to blow stuff up, you’re still allowed a certain level of calamitous authority. Why are there explosives attached to your car in ScreamRider? Why is there the option to hit turbo boost and fly into buildings after you’ve derailed? Because it’s fun to watch it all collapse.
ScreamRide, while not consciously operating on a planned narrative, invokes a sense of wonder about its larger world. You’re repeatedly murdering everyone aboard its crafts of doom, and yet every time the mission is over there’s a short cinematic of its participants emerging unscathed from whatever horrific carnage you’ve unleashed (though it feels like the same five of these are repeated every time, and tend to get boring). Along similar lines, ScreamRide’s disaffected narration and sheer eagerness of the personnel riding along place the game in a far flung future where sensation seeking activity is at an all-time high, and people ache to get slain in the most chaotic way imaginable to feel something – because nanomachines will instantly repair grievous bodily harm. I made that last sentence up, but it fits neatly inside ScreamRide’s assumed fiction
Most of my gripes with the game amount to weird little annoyances. The problematic camera in Engineer mode is its greatest offense, but it’s joined by a bunch of user-interface oddities. I’ve never complained about text size in any of my reviews, but ScreamRide’s tiny letters and ambiguous font are way too hard to see at reasonable distance. Coupled with that is the results screen that pops up after a challenge and lists all of your stats. This is fine; other than there seems to be like three extra stat lines for the allotted space, and the information briefly rotates up and down. There’s plenty of room available on screen, so why partly obscure tiny stats at two second intervals? Additionally, the grading scale that tells you if any of your stats are positive or negative literally disappears after a few seconds. Both of these shortcomings seem insane to have been overlooked, and I hope they’ll be patched out in a future update.
There’s also the bothersome feeling that ScreamRide’s visual load-out was compromised by its simultaneous release on Xbox 360. The game accomplishes everything it needs to, and truth be told your ticket’s punched for amusing, believable, and impressive demolition. Average visuals and frame-rate in the 30’s suffer no impact on the game’s performance, other than to annoy people who obsess over it every time out. There’s a right to gripe about the game’s cheaper price tag on an older platform (it’s only $30 on Xbox 360), but ScreamRide’s triumvirate campaign and general novelty are enough to qualify its asking price on Xbox One.
ScreamRide’s surviving definition might be analogous to its partitioned soundtrack. Engineering courses together is supported by soothing, lightly melodic electronic pieces, suggesting its composer spent a lot of time listening to either Kid A or Tycho’s recent work. There’s a delicate art to the marvelous construction of death and/or near-death machines, and it’s perfect for accompanying background noise. In sequences of seething action, ScreamRide is outfitted with noisy, dubstep-y tunes and other infectious beats likely appropriate for a propelling a roller coaster and all of its occupants into oblivion.
In the middle, typically backing Demolition Expert, is a juxtaposition of rhythmic electronica and jazzy baselines. This speaks to ScreamRide as a whole, a wildly divergent and simultaneously cohesive package with measured interests in action, puzzles, and creation. How Frontier Developments managed to wrap their ideas around chaotic roller coaster capers is a miracle and a mystery, but the Xbox One’s library and the medium as a whole stands taller for it.
