D4n
TS Member
- Favourite Ride
- Zadra
Hi all,
Presently, I am trapped in a quarantine hotel having tested positive for covid when trying to enter Abu Dhabi; as such, particularly with the duration of quarantine here still being 10 days, I can consider myself extremely bored at this point and therefore more able to delve into a moderately detailed trip report than I otherwise would have bothered with. On the negative side, the main purpose of this trip was of course to visit Ferrari World in Abu Dhabi and that has been wiped from the trip as a consequence of the positive test (I will certainly not be risking another positive result and the subsequent additional 10 days in quarantine) - perhaps I will return to the UAE with this target in mind on a subsequent trip, although I consider that unlikely.
Fortunately, we visited Dubai first and there are no requirements for testing in order to visit the tourist attractions and theme parks there. I was therefore able to experience Motiongate Dubai, Bollywood Parks Dubai, IMG Worlds of Adventure and Legoland Dubai, as well as waterparks in the form of Atlantis and Wild Wadi. These experiences varied rather drastically in quality and thus I will discuss them individually as I progress through the trip report.
The first theme park that I visited in Dubai was Motiongate, purchasing a one-day, two-park combo ticket so that we could also experience Bollywood Parks Dubai on the first day of the trip. I was worried about squeezing two parks into one day but, for two reasons, I needn't have been. The first was that I ended up returning to Motiongate later in the trip on a combo ticket with Legoland and the second was that both parks were rather smaller than expected and also extremely quiet.
Visiting Dubai in summer, one thing that can certainly be anticipated is the extreme heat. On this first theme park day of the trip, the temperature exceeded 42* C with a "feels like" temperature hovering above the 50*C mark. It was absolutely boiling. Considering this, it was perhaps no surprise to find the entrance plaza deserted on arrival and there was a general feeling that there were more staff at the park than guests; something that I have only previously experienced on my visits to Poland to visit Legendia and Energylandia. It is clear that, realistically, these theme parks should be closed during a period where they will be haemorrhaging money but I suppose, in both cases, the parks have moneybags owners and profit is perhaps not the number one priority.
The park is small, dominated by a huge, thinly disguised warehouse at the back which was both a huge relief in terms of providing air-conditioning and also home to the two stand-out attractions at the park. This is the Dreamworks area, split into four separate mini-areas based on a different IP, with each of those mini-areas having a headline attraction and a support attraction. Dragon Gliders is the main attraction in the How to Train Your Dragon themed area and is absolutely outstanding; for those of you that have visited Europa Park this is basically the Arthur ride system bearing its' full potential. Gone are the silly, themeless "coaster" sections replaced by a more compelling storyline which reminded me of Harry Potter & TFJ. Obviously, this isn't quite as good as that but the mixture of screens and animatronics was excellent and this all culminated with a finale soaring over the indoor area, which in itself represents something very similar in the Arthur area at Europa Park. Excellent.
The next stand-out attraction in the area was the Shrek themed dark ride. I loved this! It's very much an old-school dark ride with a variety of effects but screens are very much kept to a minimum. It doesn't attempt to tell a new story but instead is the first film told in "puppet show" format (needless to say, the strings are just for effect, the animatronics are doing all the work). It's a dark ride on a grand scale and has a good 5 minute duration without any real dead spots. Most of all, I felt that this ride had some character to it, something that I did feel the majority of the park is sadly lacking.
Which brings us to a good example of this lack of character, the Madagascar coaster. Essentially a launched Gerst Infinity coaster. The coaster itself is great. It's smooth, helped along by lap-bar restraints, and packed full of air-time. I would actually rank it as my favourite coaster on the trip. However, the ride is completely soulless. The figures used on the ride, on the preamble and launch track, are static and there is nothing going on during the ride itself, it's merely a journey through the black warehouse. Nonetheless, a great coaster.
The remaining "headline" attraction for a Dreamworks IP was Kung-Fu Panda: Unstoppable Awesomeness. This suffered from a major irritation that I had with many of the dark rides across this park and also Bollywood Parks. It was a crap, barely disguised, motion simulator (and for this one you had to suffer through two painfully unfunny "pre-shows" despite the ride, as with all the others, being completely dead) where you sit in a vehicle and it drives slowly into the rudimentary 180* screen at the start of the ride. It's rubbish, it's not believable and the 3D glasses are clunky and also pretty ineffective at actually showing a 3D image when it appears to have been shot on a potato.
This was also the case for Panem Aerial Tours , the first attraction in an extremely underwhelming, miniscule Hunger Games themed mini-area, with two impressive ride station buildings and pretty much nothing else apart from a big screen. However, the main attraction here - Capitol Bullet Train - really delivers. It was my first time experiencing one of the Mack shuttle coasters and they sure are fun, especially on the back. The extreme heat was clearly at play to an extent though, with the "Mack rattle" being very prominent and the coaster also seeming crazily intense (I greyed out on many of my rides - something unthinkable on a Mack usually) - both inversions are extremely well taken and there is a rather severe pop of ejector air-time in the middle of the ride. Short, but never a dull moment.
However, both Capitol Bullet Train and neighbouring spinning coaster Now You See Me shared a very similar flaw - lack of theming. Both had beautifully decorated queue lines based on the film that they were inspired by, but then amount to little more than coasters slapped on concrete at the end of the day. I don't know what the reason for this is, but it all feels very Six Flags. Now You See Me was a standard Maurer spinner, probably ranking somewhere between Spinball Whizzer at the lower end but below Dragon's Fury - although queuing 0 minutes rather than 60 was a nice bonus. The John Wick coaster appeared to suffer a similar fate but this one one of two rides closed "for maintenance" along with the river rapids... because why would you keep your only water ride open in 45* heat?
The Columbia Pictures and Smurfs areas of the park are poor, there's no getting away from that. Green Hornet represents another unthemed coaster, whilst Hotel Transylvania is one of the barest dark rides I've ever done and Ghostbusters was an interactive screen-based dark rides with worse graphics than a Nintendo Wii. The Smurfs dark ride had more to look at, but mainly static figures, reminding me in many ways of Charlie & the Chocolate Factory. The Smurfs coaster was actually pretty good for a family ride and did have some theming - worth doing not just for hardcore cred hunters. Zombieland is a very good S&S tower - runs on a shot and drop cycle and packs a punch with both, unfortunately the seats are sat in the sun all day and literally burn you senseless when you sit in them.
Last of all, a shout-out to Underworld 4D for being the absolute worst 4D cinema that I've ever done. An completely, utterly incomprehensible series of random events.
Overall, Motiongate is a park with a lot of nice features, particularly focused in the Dreamworks area. However, it is far from comparable to other, similarly styled parks such as Universal, and unfortunately it suffers many of the same flaws as Energylandia. Hastily added, cheap feeling rides in many areas to "pad out" the ride offering, as well as a complete and utterly undeniable lack of soul. Worth visiting if you're in the area.
Next up, Bollywood Parks Dubai (that'll be a short installment!)
Presently, I am trapped in a quarantine hotel having tested positive for covid when trying to enter Abu Dhabi; as such, particularly with the duration of quarantine here still being 10 days, I can consider myself extremely bored at this point and therefore more able to delve into a moderately detailed trip report than I otherwise would have bothered with. On the negative side, the main purpose of this trip was of course to visit Ferrari World in Abu Dhabi and that has been wiped from the trip as a consequence of the positive test (I will certainly not be risking another positive result and the subsequent additional 10 days in quarantine) - perhaps I will return to the UAE with this target in mind on a subsequent trip, although I consider that unlikely.
Fortunately, we visited Dubai first and there are no requirements for testing in order to visit the tourist attractions and theme parks there. I was therefore able to experience Motiongate Dubai, Bollywood Parks Dubai, IMG Worlds of Adventure and Legoland Dubai, as well as waterparks in the form of Atlantis and Wild Wadi. These experiences varied rather drastically in quality and thus I will discuss them individually as I progress through the trip report.
The first theme park that I visited in Dubai was Motiongate, purchasing a one-day, two-park combo ticket so that we could also experience Bollywood Parks Dubai on the first day of the trip. I was worried about squeezing two parks into one day but, for two reasons, I needn't have been. The first was that I ended up returning to Motiongate later in the trip on a combo ticket with Legoland and the second was that both parks were rather smaller than expected and also extremely quiet.
Visiting Dubai in summer, one thing that can certainly be anticipated is the extreme heat. On this first theme park day of the trip, the temperature exceeded 42* C with a "feels like" temperature hovering above the 50*C mark. It was absolutely boiling. Considering this, it was perhaps no surprise to find the entrance plaza deserted on arrival and there was a general feeling that there were more staff at the park than guests; something that I have only previously experienced on my visits to Poland to visit Legendia and Energylandia. It is clear that, realistically, these theme parks should be closed during a period where they will be haemorrhaging money but I suppose, in both cases, the parks have moneybags owners and profit is perhaps not the number one priority.
The park is small, dominated by a huge, thinly disguised warehouse at the back which was both a huge relief in terms of providing air-conditioning and also home to the two stand-out attractions at the park. This is the Dreamworks area, split into four separate mini-areas based on a different IP, with each of those mini-areas having a headline attraction and a support attraction. Dragon Gliders is the main attraction in the How to Train Your Dragon themed area and is absolutely outstanding; for those of you that have visited Europa Park this is basically the Arthur ride system bearing its' full potential. Gone are the silly, themeless "coaster" sections replaced by a more compelling storyline which reminded me of Harry Potter & TFJ. Obviously, this isn't quite as good as that but the mixture of screens and animatronics was excellent and this all culminated with a finale soaring over the indoor area, which in itself represents something very similar in the Arthur area at Europa Park. Excellent.
The next stand-out attraction in the area was the Shrek themed dark ride. I loved this! It's very much an old-school dark ride with a variety of effects but screens are very much kept to a minimum. It doesn't attempt to tell a new story but instead is the first film told in "puppet show" format (needless to say, the strings are just for effect, the animatronics are doing all the work). It's a dark ride on a grand scale and has a good 5 minute duration without any real dead spots. Most of all, I felt that this ride had some character to it, something that I did feel the majority of the park is sadly lacking.
Which brings us to a good example of this lack of character, the Madagascar coaster. Essentially a launched Gerst Infinity coaster. The coaster itself is great. It's smooth, helped along by lap-bar restraints, and packed full of air-time. I would actually rank it as my favourite coaster on the trip. However, the ride is completely soulless. The figures used on the ride, on the preamble and launch track, are static and there is nothing going on during the ride itself, it's merely a journey through the black warehouse. Nonetheless, a great coaster.
The remaining "headline" attraction for a Dreamworks IP was Kung-Fu Panda: Unstoppable Awesomeness. This suffered from a major irritation that I had with many of the dark rides across this park and also Bollywood Parks. It was a crap, barely disguised, motion simulator (and for this one you had to suffer through two painfully unfunny "pre-shows" despite the ride, as with all the others, being completely dead) where you sit in a vehicle and it drives slowly into the rudimentary 180* screen at the start of the ride. It's rubbish, it's not believable and the 3D glasses are clunky and also pretty ineffective at actually showing a 3D image when it appears to have been shot on a potato.
This was also the case for Panem Aerial Tours , the first attraction in an extremely underwhelming, miniscule Hunger Games themed mini-area, with two impressive ride station buildings and pretty much nothing else apart from a big screen. However, the main attraction here - Capitol Bullet Train - really delivers. It was my first time experiencing one of the Mack shuttle coasters and they sure are fun, especially on the back. The extreme heat was clearly at play to an extent though, with the "Mack rattle" being very prominent and the coaster also seeming crazily intense (I greyed out on many of my rides - something unthinkable on a Mack usually) - both inversions are extremely well taken and there is a rather severe pop of ejector air-time in the middle of the ride. Short, but never a dull moment.
However, both Capitol Bullet Train and neighbouring spinning coaster Now You See Me shared a very similar flaw - lack of theming. Both had beautifully decorated queue lines based on the film that they were inspired by, but then amount to little more than coasters slapped on concrete at the end of the day. I don't know what the reason for this is, but it all feels very Six Flags. Now You See Me was a standard Maurer spinner, probably ranking somewhere between Spinball Whizzer at the lower end but below Dragon's Fury - although queuing 0 minutes rather than 60 was a nice bonus. The John Wick coaster appeared to suffer a similar fate but this one one of two rides closed "for maintenance" along with the river rapids... because why would you keep your only water ride open in 45* heat?
The Columbia Pictures and Smurfs areas of the park are poor, there's no getting away from that. Green Hornet represents another unthemed coaster, whilst Hotel Transylvania is one of the barest dark rides I've ever done and Ghostbusters was an interactive screen-based dark rides with worse graphics than a Nintendo Wii. The Smurfs dark ride had more to look at, but mainly static figures, reminding me in many ways of Charlie & the Chocolate Factory. The Smurfs coaster was actually pretty good for a family ride and did have some theming - worth doing not just for hardcore cred hunters. Zombieland is a very good S&S tower - runs on a shot and drop cycle and packs a punch with both, unfortunately the seats are sat in the sun all day and literally burn you senseless when you sit in them.
Last of all, a shout-out to Underworld 4D for being the absolute worst 4D cinema that I've ever done. An completely, utterly incomprehensible series of random events.
Overall, Motiongate is a park with a lot of nice features, particularly focused in the Dreamworks area. However, it is far from comparable to other, similarly styled parks such as Universal, and unfortunately it suffers many of the same flaws as Energylandia. Hastily added, cheap feeling rides in many areas to "pad out" the ride offering, as well as a complete and utterly undeniable lack of soul. Worth visiting if you're in the area.
Next up, Bollywood Parks Dubai (that'll be a short installment!)