As others have said, Blue Fire isn’t perfect. It certainly isn’t an overly intense experience. If that’s what you’re looking for, it won’t completely satisfy. It’s very clear that it was new territory for Mack. It was by far their biggest project at the time it was built. For a company who, while having dabbled in other things, was primarily known for powered mine trains and wild mice, it was a significant milestone. Since then the product has been refined and the boundaries pushed further with installations such as Helix and DC Rivals. It happens with most products. They mature.
However, Blue Fire
is excellent at what it does. It’s fun. It has a decent layout with some great inversions. The launch is surprisingly punchy for a LIM system. It’s pretty well paced and flows nicely from one moment to the next. Couple that with the overall package and theming and you have a great all round attraction. It isn’t top 10 for me by any means, but it’s certainly a memorable and enjoyable ride that I have no major gripe with (provided you don’t get stapled in by an over enthusiastic host).
Icon on the other hand is tedious. It’s layout is uninspiring and clearly a product of “ok, what other bit of space can we get something in next?”. The result is a whole lot of steel trying to get from A to B without achieving a fat lot. For some parks, their limitations, be it space, planning, or topographic, are what lead to their most inspired creations. This is not the case with Icon.
The top hat is fine, the roll and dive into the second launch are good, but everything else is completely forgettable. The first launch is laughable. I’ve had more thrilling rides across the Tesco car park in a shopping trolly. The second half is then pretty much a series of long drawn out turns with some odd variance in height to prevent it turning into Rita at 20mph. I spend the whole second part of the ride wishing it’d just do
something!
Icon feels more like the prototype experience than Blue Fire! “Oooh don’t run the launches too fast. And don’t give it anything too extreme to try and do!” It’s certainly a step backwards from the other iterations of the model, and totally lacking in ambition.
Personally I feel like Icon sometimes gets praise thrown at it, simply for being something different in the UK.
- It’s the first LIM launch.
- It’s one of our only inverting coasters with lap bars.
- It’s the only rolling launch and part of a fairly small number of them in Europe.
- It’s the only major Mack coaster we have.
- It’s now also the only *ahem* “extreme spinning coaster” in the country.
That’s all well and good, and fair play on Blackpool for doing something different. But just because it’s different, doesn’t make it good. If that were the case, Furius Baco would be one of the world’s best rides.
I’m not trying to invalidate anyone else’s experience here. We all like different things. I will always try to understand different people’s perspective, even if I don’t necessarily agree with them (and likewise, I have some of my own views and ratings that I know I am in the minority on). But some of the praise and claims I hear levied at Icon leave me baffled and wondering if there’s some secret second Icon that I’ve not yet ridden!
