I've just watched a POV of the updated Tomb Blaster and I have to say I'm a little disappointed. You can tell the targets are new and the audio is much better but other than that the changes are hard to see. Now the ride is coated in UV paint the scenes are now in near total darkness and you can't actually see half of the theming, although I could see enough to notice some of the effects such as the boulder were not working.
Although some areas look more aesthetically pleasing, I don't know where the supposedly huge budget has been spent.
This goes to show how you should never judge from a video, as it becomes clear in person that the audio and lighting changes do quite the opposite of what you say here (still not a good thing). The new lighting is glaringly bright, lighting just as much back of house things like roofs, bare metal walls, fire exits, access points and damage than the sets. It's all UV LED so may not show up in a video like it does to the eye, but everything is bright purple. The sets look flat, homogeneous and bland with little variation of colour throughout (ironically the opposite of how Terror Tomb's lighting scheme was designed). The grander finale & fire pit scenes suit UV but are still way off the mark.
If they were going for a more ghosttrain-style fluorescent make over then it hasn't worked and hasn't been carried out appropriately. There is pretty much no sense of darkness at all in the ride now, it feels wrong and almost as if the working lights are on as you ride through a warehouse.
The audio is now missing all sound effects (the flying axes, snakes, mummy scream at the end, etc) and for technical reasons this cannot be fixed, unless more money is spent on new equipment after the originals were thrown out. There is now some ambiance mixed into the tracks as compensation but it's very harsh to the ear and could do with remixing.
A very unprofessional refurbishment, but not surprising since the only reason the ride was refurbished was to resolve some H&S and neglect issues, and that's where most the (relatively small, for Merlin) budget went to. The quality of the ride experience was clearly not prioritised.
