Idle Scream Park Review

A Theme Bark That Bites

With Halloween just around the corner who wouldn’t want to manage their own scary theme park? Tap Lab’s Idle Scream Park allows players to do just that. You’ll build and upgrade rides, summon new décor and harvest your customer’s fear. Unfortunately, it turns out running a theme park is a lot less fun then going to one.

Idle Scream Park takes the idle part of its title seriously. Tap to build an entrance, where customers purchase tickets, or a ride, then tap to upgrade it until you run out of cash. Each ride has three types of upgrades—price, seats and queues. Upgrading price allows you to charge more for entrance to a ride. Seat upgrades allow more customers to enjoy a given ride and upgrading the queue allows for longer lines. Rides start out basic but gain spookier décor as they are leveled up. Unfortunately, there are only a handful of rides to build. So far, I’ve unlocked the ghost ship, the gloomy cemetery, the infinite maze, the terror mines and I only have three rides left to unlock. While the premise of the game is intriguing the lack of content is not.

One component I found interesting is harvesting customer’s fear. When a customer faints they are rushed to the Shock room where they are revived. However, during this process their fear is collected. Collect enough fear and you can spend it on a special summons. Summons allow players to collect fragments of décor which offer various park boosts. When you attain enough fragments of a specific décor item, the item levels up. For example, a level cave spider increases the speed of the terror mines by fifteen percent.

Location, Location, Location

The most infuriating aspect of Idle Scream Park is that to build certain rides you’ll need to sell your park and purchase a new location. Essentially, this means, after wasting countless hours building your park tap by tap, you have to start from scratch. It seems like a cheap attempt to fool the player into believing there is more game content than there actually is. By the time I moved to the third park location I was fed-up with this title.

All about Them Ads

If you are not keen on waiting for your wallet to overflow?  Idle Scream Park provides players with plenty of opportunities to nab some extra cash. The catch is you’re going to have to watch an ad. While the occasional ad is a generally expected aspect of free mobile games, the number of ads you’ll come across while tapping away at your idle park is overwhelming. Need more cash? Watch an ad. Want a free summons? Watch an ad.

Not only does Idle Scream Park overwhelm you with ads, it also doesn’t shy away from in-app purchases either. If you want to avoid the endless advertisements, you can always reach into your real wallet and shell out $9.99 to remove them from the game. You can also hire Frankenstein for $9.99 to keep your park raking in the cash for an extra ten hours. Tokens which are used to purchase common and epic summons ranges in price from a dollar to a whopping $99.99. Does any of this sound worth it to you? I didn’t think so.

Idle Scream Park is far more idle than it is an engaging experience. Sure, you may find yourself addictively tapping away, but you’ll soon realize you’re just not having fun. With pricey in-app purchases, excessive ads and little content, Idle Scream Park isn’t worth the download. In fact, the only thing that about Idle Scream Park that will haunt you is the amount of time you waste playing it.