If no entertainment park simulators had ever been released before Marine Park Empire, this game would have likely received a much higher score in the gameplay department. Sadly for Enlight, though, this game is a fairly tired rehash of gameplay elements that have already been done to death by other games ending in the words “Empire,” “Park,” or “Creator.”
That said, this game is a decent iteration of the “build your own theme park” subgenre with a few unique kicks, though it’s still not that different from its many, many predecessors. While your reviewer would by no means recommend a purchase (even for $20) of this game for anyone except those with a particular obsession for Sea World, you can wring a bit of quality gameplay out of this clone.
The game’s primary strength is how large it feels. You get a ton of buildings, attractions, etc. to play with, and you get to do so over what seems like a much larger area than other park simulators have provided. The attractions especially are pretty cool in this game- the graphical presentation is nice, and the variety of sea-dwelling beasts you get to put on display here You also get a nice terrain editor. Despite the rather intricate apparatus that the game uses to convey your instructions to the game, it’s not hard to learn how to play. The bulk of this easy gameplay, of course, is spent in micromanaging nearly every aspect of your ever-growing park to ensure its success. This is hardly novel, of course, but there are worse ways to spend your time.
Inexperienced micromanagers might find the game intimidating due to its large variety of items and the traps that you can fall into. To illustrate this last point, I should mention that the game requires attentive surveillance and action on nearly everything you put in the park, and improper balances of items, or inefficient placements of particular facilities or attractions, will quickly make it difficult for your park to function. Laziness will also cost you- though it’s possible to automate some of your park’s maintenance via generic staff orders, putting some effort into a scheme that makes your staff maximize their efficiency pays off big time in terms of customer happiness (and the ease with which you maintain your park). It’s easy to learn how to overcome such problems and learn such skills, partially thanks to some very well-put together tutorials, but the game stagnates from there; the “scenario” games it gives aside from the free build mode are ok, but they aren’t great (they’re of the short and questionably sweet variety), and they won’t keep you occupied for long anyway.
This should all sound familiar, for the seasoned gamer will know what I mean when I say “micromanaging” in the context of a theme park game. Prices, placement of attractions, use of hired staff and their instructions for maintaining the park, and generally seeing to customer needs using the tools the game gives you- these are the basic mechanics of this and most other theme park games. It can be terribly engaging for short periods of time, but over the long run, it gets more or less dreary and repetitive. The game does attempt to alleviate this by adding “scenarios” for you to manage in addition to the free play mode, but this doesn’t help much.
The primary way the game attempts to give itself depth is, again, through the huge number of items you can build. The problem with this is simply that everybody and their mother has seen this sort of experience before, and the game, instead of tweaking the dynamic in a new way to make it interesting, simply shovels up more of the same old stuff. It’s not a bad game in and of itself, it’s just utterly unoriginal.
The game feels quite good graphically. It has a cartoony feel that was doubtless designed to appeal to the target market’s age group. That cartoony-feel is well executed and looks solid regardless of how far you zoom in (although if you have a large park, it looks pretty cool to zoom out and marvel at the size of it). Occasionally the game glitches up a little bit, but there’s nothing that seriously interrupts the gameplay.
The sound effects are workable (not to mention cartoony, completing the theme), as is the soundtrack, which is decent background music that never really gets annoying or intrudes on the gameplay. No special effort really seems to have gone into it, though.
Sadly, because it’s really no different from any other park game, Marine Park Empire does not have a lot of play in it, and you will quickly find yourself tired with the repetition the game subjects you to.
For this reason especially, the game shouldn’t be purchased, except perhaps for bright pre-teens with a particular interest in aquatic zoology- there are other games of still higher a quality than this one in the sim genre, which is itself becoming fairly dilapidated. Given the fact that it IS yet another sim game, however, the game is not relatively bad. I’d urge you to save up your $20 for something else, though, something that you’ll play more often. This is one of those games that you’ll put in your CD jacket after its initial play-through, and one that will remain there, flipped-over many times as you look for a good game to play in subsequent months and years.
