HeartlineCoaster
Theme Park Superhero
Florida. They've got rides right? I'm sure you've never heard about them before.
I keep bemoaning having to play this waiting game for new rides, but we've been actually pretty lucky recently when it comes to entire new parks. There's one out here too, apparently.
Day 0
Travel tried it's best to be a pain in the ass, as usual. Our plane got swapped last minute which messed up the prepaid seating arrangements and required a 4-hour-early airport arrival to have an argument at a desk. Then got treated to 10 hours of no wi-fi or on-board 'entertainment'. They even tried to not give me food.
Then got way more scammed by the car hire than I had ever been worried about in Saudi, so that's 2 for 2 in Florida.
Then the hotel tried to give us the wrong room.
Ugh, everything's a faff.
Day 1 - Epic Universe
Top priority and first on the agenda was of course the new kid in town. We had deliberately held off until 2026 and this time of year for both the ability to visit Epic on multiple days on a Universal combo ticket, and because it's the 'quietest time to do Orlando'. Hold that thought.
In we went anyway, first impressions were rather nice on the visual front, save for the fact that the moving parts of the entrance decoration are already broken.
The same was the case at the entrance to Stardust Racers, with the small twirling comet out of action. That could be forgiven however, as the coasters were actually operating. They valleyed mere days before our visit and it had been looking pretty squeaky as to whether we'd be receiving the ultimate spite at the very first hurdle.
As the flagship Mack multi-launch of the park, it was by far the draw of the trip and something that seemed to be very much my kinda thing.
I'll apologise now for the general lack of photos in this report as, spoiler alert, 90% of the holiday was spent in either a queueline or not in a park at all.
So, how was the ride(s)? Pretty spectacular.
There's a lot for me to like here, thought I sadly didn't get enough time as I would have liked to fully digest the experience. We had 4 laps total on this day, 2 each side, 2 day and 2 night.
Things I enjoy:
Airtime, and lots of it. With only the 1 inversion per side it's potentially the most airtime focused of this hardware going at the moment, and it kicks ass in multiple ways.
Both launches. The first one has a cute, two-stage kick to it like a mini homage to Kingda Ka and/or a tease to those who would belittle the launch on a Mack launch. It's characterful.
The second one has the ability to speed up the 'losing' train with an extra 'boost mode', mid-launch which is like an evolution of those silly duelling RMC lift hills and I adore this feature both visually and when it happens to you.
Both sides seemed equally awesome to me, minor details on each make them respectively better and worse at different things like positives, or the ways in which the inversion behaves, so if and when I come to rank it will just be Stardust Racers - the collective package, rather than - #672 green, back left but one, full moon on a Monday and #738 the other side.
Things that could be improved:
There seems to be a minor weird cross-bracing, Voltron bounce situation going on in the first couple of elements. Old mate John Kramer and his fluffed up top hat forces appear to have left behind a bit of a crunch in the valleys on either side and these were a little jarring to my head on a wheel seat near the front, but your mileage may vary of course.
I had high hopes for the on-board soundtrack, particularly after hearing the extra detail that went into making it different day and night. While riding however, I found it pretty easy to tune out as the music just wasn't hitting hard enough or seemingly specifically tailored to the layout, like it is on Blue Fire for instance, that one time it worked. The night one is better though.
Reliability. We'll get to that.
Satisfied with our morning tick-off of those two anyway, we headed off into Dragon land.
As a fan, I love that this area is a thing now.
They have pretty tightly nailed down the swell of emotions that should accompany the audio-visual hit upon arrival, if you know how it goes.
There's also a ton of moving details around to marvel at, if you have the luxury of time, and they're working.
Always a mission at hand though, we headed straight to the cred, which had broken down already.
Joined the queue anyway only to get stuck at the first member of staff who wasn't clearly acknowledging whether guests could enter, instead directing all attention to a group of guests who had called first aid for the sake of a bug bite.
Following that moment of bewilderment we snaked our way through about an hour of waiting, by the time the ride fixed itself, and boarded.
I'll blame the setup rather than myself in this case as there aren't many photo opportunities for the coaster. It's a family Intamin with superior on-board audio that begins with a cute launch sequence including Hiccup and Toothless animatronics.
The upwards-ness of this initial acceleration gives it a little more punch than you might expect and leads to some fun, friendly flopping around some elevation, twists and turns, out over the water and into a tight corner with some surprising positive force.
Second launch is tucked away as it's own scene again and brings you to a stop, some minor backwards shenanigans as cute dragons appear and eggs explode before you launch, upwards once again, into the next half.
This has some scenery near misses, more dragons and some floatier hill bits before ending on the brakes with one of many possible audio announcements from Hiccup to cap off the experience. I loved learning new details about the attraction each time and it's such a pleasant sit-down from start to finish.
We then had the apparently famous mac'n'cheese in a big cone of bread from dragon land, before heading off into scary land, I think. Details of sequence are a little hazy on this trip as there was so much back and forth.
Scary land is also my kinda vibe, if a little busy and sunburny by this point in the day.
But it was all worth it for this beauty. Time to unchain some monsters.
My most anticipated dark ride of the trip was a visual treat from the off, adventuring through several rooms of strong atmosphere and pretty much walking straight into the first of two preshows.
Igor introduces the premise in the first, accompanied by a scale model of the ride vehicles - a small Kuka arm in disguise, the size you might find in a factory rather than a theme park. Fun part of this is that he loses control of it and it ragdolls the mini guests around, to great audible reaction of the general public.
Room two is where the next-level animatronic stuff happens, notably the lip-syncing of Victoria Frankenstein is on point and her big old familiar monster friend casually walking out and interacting with the crowd is mind-blowing in many moments. Best of all, these were pretty much the only special effects in Orlando that worked reliably all trip.
Lockers follow that fun, it's the best time to talk about them now because I either saw or invented the best theme park detail of a generation. The storage system is park wide and in most major attraction queuelines, scanning your face at the push of a button to grant access and later retrieve your valuables. I'm 90% sure while watching and waiting for someone else to do it for this attraction, that the standard preview of their face you get to confirm was replaced by a jump scare of Dracula himself. Never saw it again, nor am I sure I want to.
As for the ride itself, I'd say it's pretty comfortably the best robot arm dark ride to date, having done the full range of famous on-brand ones to obscure Chinese ones. It only evolved the technology in perhaps more subtle ways than I had imagined, but the presentation and delivery is second to none.
To start, the seats are lessed boxed in, where previous attempts were made to hide how the system worked, and to include on-board audio. Here the speakers are subtly built into the shoulder restraint and you've got an overall more open feeling of being right in the thick of it. It's very rare that a ride gets scenes this close to your face, which only adds to the thrill and spectacle.
There's everything to love and look at, from intense bursts of fire to massive animatronics, old school ghost train figures on sticks to scary screens for the more grizzly details of the story. The seats also vibrate to make you feel the effects a bit more.
It's very well paced, and the movements range from head-punchingly strong at times to gently weaving through the action. There's a couple of especially clever moments of being chased by something digital, full-on put on your back to pass under an obstacle, only for the threat to jump-scare you as a physical set piece the other side. Though many may bemoan the use of screens at all, I find these types of techniques are about as flawless as it gets when combining both worlds.
I could go on, the massive Mummy flailing at you from the ceiling is incredible and it ends with a very dark moment punctuated by a great little musical hook that stuck in my mind many times. An attraction truly worthy of the word Epic.
Less than epic was the afterthought coaster of the area. Queue moved reasonably well for us under such poor capacity but the ride was a bit of a non-event. I got a little excited as we moved out on our Mack spinner onto a launch track, haunted by memories of the Ride to Happiness. This layout just never gets going however, mincing around a short while before getting stuck in an awkward swing launch through a shed with a broken titular Werewolf I failed to even see three times.
The experience was best summarised by a child who left through the exit gates with us, thinking aloud - 'was it worth the wait? mmm... not really'.
We had tactically been avoiding the real monster queues until this point, and Ministry had suddenly dipped to an all time low of 90 minutes, so it was time for the next land.
Harry Potter and the Fantastic Beasts but not really land.
I'm in a weird place with the franchise, from the generation which had it defining many a childhood. Very familiar with the source material, used to love the books, films kinda killed it, then I enjoyed the new series more than most, then it got political. Still a fan of a certain brand of wizard rock.
As such, any attraction like this comes under extreme scrutiny, for better or worse. It has the potential to make me feel things, or to make me tragically laugh out loud. I knew basically nothing about the ride itself going into the Battle at the Ministry here.
Start of the queue is very similar to the big boys in the other two parks - tons of cattlepen in an area outside the building, couple of posters on the walls. Difference here is it's French, and old.
Then you get to a batch point and, in your groups, enter the floo network through a real-time puff of green smoke, which is pretty epic in itself and elevated our excitement.
Immediately afterward, having been transported through time and space, you're hit with a visual feast of a queueline.
Which elevates the excitement even more, only to have it slowly crushed by barely moving for what feels like hours. The pacing is way off. The advertised 90 minutes came and went in this very room, before we began to slowly lose our minds.
2 hours in, the spectacle had been reduced to cleaning equipment, which isn't even that magic because it could equally function as just a plain robot these days.
2.5 hours in, we were laughing at the unpainted walls of a single rider queue, who were suffering even more than ourselves.
3 hours in you get to this, when it's too late to care, and doesn't really make sense in the narrative of going to see a criminal trial.
Then there's stairs. Then you board your weird box lifts which represent the new generation of 'we want to hide the ride system from you'.
First things first, it's a cool ride system. You're only seatbelted in like a Tower of Terror and it's got a bit of pep to the vertical movement and bounce it can provide as it drives you around between scenes, tilting and whirling as it goes.
The storyline melted my brain however, bringing about near-delusional experiences and regular fits of stitches. From the offset it's plainly obvious that the actors are no longer involved with this endeavour as, though you are greeted by Harry, Ron and Hermione, it's the most unnatural and robotic delivery of dialogue imaginable. Though they're standing in the same lift, they could be worlds apart, and Harry's instant out-of-character deadpan delivery of 'I don't want to be late' in a slightly off British accent landed the killer blow.
Umbridge starts kicking off at us next, and here's where visual representation of magic action never really worked, cos she stands there, wand pointed directly at you, and then tells Yaxley to kill us. Could have just done it yourself in less words. Aside from this, there was really no reason to call him Yaxley other than an obscure name drop, because his face is masked and his voice is suspiciously American.
We open out into quite a striking visual moment, as the screens start to be fronted by physical stuff and everything suddenly has more scale to it, a bit like the broken chairs strewn in front of the end sequence of Beijing Jurassic Park. I can do obscure name drops too.
More unconvincing battle stuff happens, leading into a scene I later found out contained a much more significant hardware 'drop' that had to be nerfed for technical reasons.
It still drops in a way, into being attacked by the only Fantastic Beast on park, for seemingly no good reason, which rams you with a big horn. This felt like the perfect opportunity to chuck old mate Newt in, as they clearly weren't going for continuity, but alas, while Eddie Redmayne adorns many billboards throughout Orlando, the only evidence I could find of him was a small prop in an obscure decorative shopfront.
Chaos ensues as we enter the 'time room', somewhere Harry has blankly and, for seemingly no good reason, stated multiple times to no one in particular that we must get to. Screen Umbridge tries to use a broken time turner, for the stage show reference I guess, then everything starts collapsing. Animatronic Umbridge shouts about this, wobbles her arms and falls into a void of space-time which is disintegrating everything.
Much like my favourite show ride of all time at Futuroscope, this moment of comedic timing can never be replicated for any other human at any point in history, but I'll try and give context. While losing the will to live in the queue, we had attempted to catch ourselves up from at least a decade ago with what had happened with Umbridge in the final book/film and where this attraction might be going with it. The most vivid moment jumping to my mind was from the film, Harry, in the Ministry, face rippling from the effects of polyjuice potion wearing off, delivering his killer callback line of 'I must not tell lies' to Umbridge and her child abuse, for reasons forgotten.
So on the ride, in the moment she falls into the void, and seemingly disintegrates to her death, Harry also flies into the void from the left, like superman with his wand out, and delivers this exact line, monotone, one more time, entirely out of context and in response to absolutely no one. Canonically to me, he also dies in this pointless act, and as a result I couldn't breathe for the rest of the ride.
Kingsley, while being the second biggest character of the queue, appears once as a crude animatronic at the end, turning Umbridge, who didn't die sadly, to what looks like stone in an underwhelming visual effect, though it's just prison clothes, and a very weird way of delivering a prison sentence at that. Then Hermione and the new elf are standing in an elevator with 3 death eaters cowering in a corner for no explained reason. Then it ends.
It was such a fever dream and I'm both fascinated and bewildered by how the average guest or fan experiences this. I can't quite wrap my head around it in particular for any supposed 'super fans' that might visit for the express purpose of the attraction, robed and scarfed up, dropping dollars on wands and chatting with staff about which house they're in. Are they able to just kick back and think 'yay, Harry Potter ride' without taking on board how poorly written, acted and executed the themed experience is? Am I the unfortunate one with the venn diagram of knowing enough to care and being on the park fan spectrum? Probably.
tl;dr it ain't worth the regular 3-4 hour queues it gets, but it made me laugh.
Speaking of regular 3-4 hour queues, we still had Nintendo land to contend with. This area was perpetually far too crowded and loud to truly enjoy, even at rope drop due to hotel early entry.
Mine-cart misery was already a write-off for the day so we jumped on Yoshi to compensate.
It's a pleasant little sit down, with a bit of interactivity. Short though.
Up some stairs is Mario Kart.
Love the first half of the queue here, tons of easter eggs and detail.
Context.
The wordless pre-show goes on a little too long, while you strap a heavy miner helmet to your face, trying to explain in simple terms - steer and shoot, get 100 coins. Decorations are appreciated again though, even Luigi's vacuum in the corner.
Similar pacing issues apply on this attraction in that the second half of the queue is mind-numbingly slow and boring in comparison to the first half, with added headwear faff. You get that hit of anticipation way too soon and it's long gone before you finally reach the vehicles.
Onboard the headgear gets even worse as you click a visor into place, awkwardly hanging from a musty ribbon cable that you try not to lick. It's chunky and weighty and pulls your head forward, limits your visibility and then off you go into a live tutorial of the pre-show that mostly wasted your time.
The pointing at things with your face to aim and shoot is a cool concept, I even enjoyed it on that weird VR coaster at Tusenfryd and... Battle for Eire?
Didn't like the ride though, it's just so chaotic but not quite in the same spirit as the game. As with a few other interactive dark ride flops of late, I found the learning curve far too overwhelming for the regularity with which you can experience the attraction and, because that's frustrating, just find myself wanting to check out and enjoy the scenery instead.
Some of the scenery is quite nice by its own merit, and the AR, when not just throwing crude kart animations at you, does manage to deliver a couple of neat visual tricks against the physical sets.
I never played any of the games past '64, so most of the tracks were lost on me. Rainbow Road at the end managed to deliver a 3-second hit of tearful nostalgia before they changed the music almost instantly, adding to the overall feeling of having the attention span of a 5 year old. Nah, this ain't it. Did manage to get exactly 100 coins, somehow, but have no idea what this achieved.
I think they tried too hard, overcompensating on the sedate pacing of the vehicles and tight footprint of the layout with overwhelming sensory stimuli. Kill the headsets, make the cars actually dynamic like Test Track and just go all in on a traditional dark ride. If you must do something interactive, make it something cool and physical against the other kart you're racing. We've just queued 90 minutes, give it time to breathe.
Finished with new attractions for the day, we left headache land and took our night laps on Stardust.
Interspersed with a night-time visit to dragon land and lap on the wing gliders.
Which is infinitely more chill.
Then caught the closing fountain show, which is kinda cool too, encompassing the entire main area and street lights. Not too epic, not too sweaty.
That was exhausting, all revisits from here on out at least, so I'll have far less to say. Probably.
Up next - space
I keep bemoaning having to play this waiting game for new rides, but we've been actually pretty lucky recently when it comes to entire new parks. There's one out here too, apparently.
Day 0
Travel tried it's best to be a pain in the ass, as usual. Our plane got swapped last minute which messed up the prepaid seating arrangements and required a 4-hour-early airport arrival to have an argument at a desk. Then got treated to 10 hours of no wi-fi or on-board 'entertainment'. They even tried to not give me food.
Then got way more scammed by the car hire than I had ever been worried about in Saudi, so that's 2 for 2 in Florida.
Then the hotel tried to give us the wrong room.
Ugh, everything's a faff.
Day 1 - Epic Universe
Top priority and first on the agenda was of course the new kid in town. We had deliberately held off until 2026 and this time of year for both the ability to visit Epic on multiple days on a Universal combo ticket, and because it's the 'quietest time to do Orlando'. Hold that thought.
In we went anyway, first impressions were rather nice on the visual front, save for the fact that the moving parts of the entrance decoration are already broken.
The same was the case at the entrance to Stardust Racers, with the small twirling comet out of action. That could be forgiven however, as the coasters were actually operating. They valleyed mere days before our visit and it had been looking pretty squeaky as to whether we'd be receiving the ultimate spite at the very first hurdle.
As the flagship Mack multi-launch of the park, it was by far the draw of the trip and something that seemed to be very much my kinda thing.
I'll apologise now for the general lack of photos in this report as, spoiler alert, 90% of the holiday was spent in either a queueline or not in a park at all.
So, how was the ride(s)? Pretty spectacular.
There's a lot for me to like here, thought I sadly didn't get enough time as I would have liked to fully digest the experience. We had 4 laps total on this day, 2 each side, 2 day and 2 night.
Things I enjoy:
Airtime, and lots of it. With only the 1 inversion per side it's potentially the most airtime focused of this hardware going at the moment, and it kicks ass in multiple ways.
Both launches. The first one has a cute, two-stage kick to it like a mini homage to Kingda Ka and/or a tease to those who would belittle the launch on a Mack launch. It's characterful.
The second one has the ability to speed up the 'losing' train with an extra 'boost mode', mid-launch which is like an evolution of those silly duelling RMC lift hills and I adore this feature both visually and when it happens to you.
Both sides seemed equally awesome to me, minor details on each make them respectively better and worse at different things like positives, or the ways in which the inversion behaves, so if and when I come to rank it will just be Stardust Racers - the collective package, rather than - #672 green, back left but one, full moon on a Monday and #738 the other side.
Things that could be improved:
There seems to be a minor weird cross-bracing, Voltron bounce situation going on in the first couple of elements. Old mate John Kramer and his fluffed up top hat forces appear to have left behind a bit of a crunch in the valleys on either side and these were a little jarring to my head on a wheel seat near the front, but your mileage may vary of course.
I had high hopes for the on-board soundtrack, particularly after hearing the extra detail that went into making it different day and night. While riding however, I found it pretty easy to tune out as the music just wasn't hitting hard enough or seemingly specifically tailored to the layout, like it is on Blue Fire for instance, that one time it worked. The night one is better though.
Reliability. We'll get to that.
Satisfied with our morning tick-off of those two anyway, we headed off into Dragon land.
As a fan, I love that this area is a thing now.
They have pretty tightly nailed down the swell of emotions that should accompany the audio-visual hit upon arrival, if you know how it goes.
There's also a ton of moving details around to marvel at, if you have the luxury of time, and they're working.
Always a mission at hand though, we headed straight to the cred, which had broken down already.
Joined the queue anyway only to get stuck at the first member of staff who wasn't clearly acknowledging whether guests could enter, instead directing all attention to a group of guests who had called first aid for the sake of a bug bite.
Following that moment of bewilderment we snaked our way through about an hour of waiting, by the time the ride fixed itself, and boarded.
I'll blame the setup rather than myself in this case as there aren't many photo opportunities for the coaster. It's a family Intamin with superior on-board audio that begins with a cute launch sequence including Hiccup and Toothless animatronics.
The upwards-ness of this initial acceleration gives it a little more punch than you might expect and leads to some fun, friendly flopping around some elevation, twists and turns, out over the water and into a tight corner with some surprising positive force.
Second launch is tucked away as it's own scene again and brings you to a stop, some minor backwards shenanigans as cute dragons appear and eggs explode before you launch, upwards once again, into the next half.
This has some scenery near misses, more dragons and some floatier hill bits before ending on the brakes with one of many possible audio announcements from Hiccup to cap off the experience. I loved learning new details about the attraction each time and it's such a pleasant sit-down from start to finish.
We then had the apparently famous mac'n'cheese in a big cone of bread from dragon land, before heading off into scary land, I think. Details of sequence are a little hazy on this trip as there was so much back and forth.
Scary land is also my kinda vibe, if a little busy and sunburny by this point in the day.
But it was all worth it for this beauty. Time to unchain some monsters.
My most anticipated dark ride of the trip was a visual treat from the off, adventuring through several rooms of strong atmosphere and pretty much walking straight into the first of two preshows.
Igor introduces the premise in the first, accompanied by a scale model of the ride vehicles - a small Kuka arm in disguise, the size you might find in a factory rather than a theme park. Fun part of this is that he loses control of it and it ragdolls the mini guests around, to great audible reaction of the general public.
Room two is where the next-level animatronic stuff happens, notably the lip-syncing of Victoria Frankenstein is on point and her big old familiar monster friend casually walking out and interacting with the crowd is mind-blowing in many moments. Best of all, these were pretty much the only special effects in Orlando that worked reliably all trip.
Lockers follow that fun, it's the best time to talk about them now because I either saw or invented the best theme park detail of a generation. The storage system is park wide and in most major attraction queuelines, scanning your face at the push of a button to grant access and later retrieve your valuables. I'm 90% sure while watching and waiting for someone else to do it for this attraction, that the standard preview of their face you get to confirm was replaced by a jump scare of Dracula himself. Never saw it again, nor am I sure I want to.
As for the ride itself, I'd say it's pretty comfortably the best robot arm dark ride to date, having done the full range of famous on-brand ones to obscure Chinese ones. It only evolved the technology in perhaps more subtle ways than I had imagined, but the presentation and delivery is second to none.
To start, the seats are lessed boxed in, where previous attempts were made to hide how the system worked, and to include on-board audio. Here the speakers are subtly built into the shoulder restraint and you've got an overall more open feeling of being right in the thick of it. It's very rare that a ride gets scenes this close to your face, which only adds to the thrill and spectacle.
There's everything to love and look at, from intense bursts of fire to massive animatronics, old school ghost train figures on sticks to scary screens for the more grizzly details of the story. The seats also vibrate to make you feel the effects a bit more.
It's very well paced, and the movements range from head-punchingly strong at times to gently weaving through the action. There's a couple of especially clever moments of being chased by something digital, full-on put on your back to pass under an obstacle, only for the threat to jump-scare you as a physical set piece the other side. Though many may bemoan the use of screens at all, I find these types of techniques are about as flawless as it gets when combining both worlds.
I could go on, the massive Mummy flailing at you from the ceiling is incredible and it ends with a very dark moment punctuated by a great little musical hook that stuck in my mind many times. An attraction truly worthy of the word Epic.
Less than epic was the afterthought coaster of the area. Queue moved reasonably well for us under such poor capacity but the ride was a bit of a non-event. I got a little excited as we moved out on our Mack spinner onto a launch track, haunted by memories of the Ride to Happiness. This layout just never gets going however, mincing around a short while before getting stuck in an awkward swing launch through a shed with a broken titular Werewolf I failed to even see three times.
The experience was best summarised by a child who left through the exit gates with us, thinking aloud - 'was it worth the wait? mmm... not really'.
We had tactically been avoiding the real monster queues until this point, and Ministry had suddenly dipped to an all time low of 90 minutes, so it was time for the next land.
Harry Potter and the Fantastic Beasts but not really land.
I'm in a weird place with the franchise, from the generation which had it defining many a childhood. Very familiar with the source material, used to love the books, films kinda killed it, then I enjoyed the new series more than most, then it got political. Still a fan of a certain brand of wizard rock.
As such, any attraction like this comes under extreme scrutiny, for better or worse. It has the potential to make me feel things, or to make me tragically laugh out loud. I knew basically nothing about the ride itself going into the Battle at the Ministry here.
Start of the queue is very similar to the big boys in the other two parks - tons of cattlepen in an area outside the building, couple of posters on the walls. Difference here is it's French, and old.
Then you get to a batch point and, in your groups, enter the floo network through a real-time puff of green smoke, which is pretty epic in itself and elevated our excitement.
Immediately afterward, having been transported through time and space, you're hit with a visual feast of a queueline.
Which elevates the excitement even more, only to have it slowly crushed by barely moving for what feels like hours. The pacing is way off. The advertised 90 minutes came and went in this very room, before we began to slowly lose our minds.
2 hours in, the spectacle had been reduced to cleaning equipment, which isn't even that magic because it could equally function as just a plain robot these days.
2.5 hours in, we were laughing at the unpainted walls of a single rider queue, who were suffering even more than ourselves.
3 hours in you get to this, when it's too late to care, and doesn't really make sense in the narrative of going to see a criminal trial.
Then there's stairs. Then you board your weird box lifts which represent the new generation of 'we want to hide the ride system from you'.
First things first, it's a cool ride system. You're only seatbelted in like a Tower of Terror and it's got a bit of pep to the vertical movement and bounce it can provide as it drives you around between scenes, tilting and whirling as it goes.
The storyline melted my brain however, bringing about near-delusional experiences and regular fits of stitches. From the offset it's plainly obvious that the actors are no longer involved with this endeavour as, though you are greeted by Harry, Ron and Hermione, it's the most unnatural and robotic delivery of dialogue imaginable. Though they're standing in the same lift, they could be worlds apart, and Harry's instant out-of-character deadpan delivery of 'I don't want to be late' in a slightly off British accent landed the killer blow.
Umbridge starts kicking off at us next, and here's where visual representation of magic action never really worked, cos she stands there, wand pointed directly at you, and then tells Yaxley to kill us. Could have just done it yourself in less words. Aside from this, there was really no reason to call him Yaxley other than an obscure name drop, because his face is masked and his voice is suspiciously American.
We open out into quite a striking visual moment, as the screens start to be fronted by physical stuff and everything suddenly has more scale to it, a bit like the broken chairs strewn in front of the end sequence of Beijing Jurassic Park. I can do obscure name drops too.
More unconvincing battle stuff happens, leading into a scene I later found out contained a much more significant hardware 'drop' that had to be nerfed for technical reasons.
It still drops in a way, into being attacked by the only Fantastic Beast on park, for seemingly no good reason, which rams you with a big horn. This felt like the perfect opportunity to chuck old mate Newt in, as they clearly weren't going for continuity, but alas, while Eddie Redmayne adorns many billboards throughout Orlando, the only evidence I could find of him was a small prop in an obscure decorative shopfront.
Chaos ensues as we enter the 'time room', somewhere Harry has blankly and, for seemingly no good reason, stated multiple times to no one in particular that we must get to. Screen Umbridge tries to use a broken time turner, for the stage show reference I guess, then everything starts collapsing. Animatronic Umbridge shouts about this, wobbles her arms and falls into a void of space-time which is disintegrating everything.
Much like my favourite show ride of all time at Futuroscope, this moment of comedic timing can never be replicated for any other human at any point in history, but I'll try and give context. While losing the will to live in the queue, we had attempted to catch ourselves up from at least a decade ago with what had happened with Umbridge in the final book/film and where this attraction might be going with it. The most vivid moment jumping to my mind was from the film, Harry, in the Ministry, face rippling from the effects of polyjuice potion wearing off, delivering his killer callback line of 'I must not tell lies' to Umbridge and her child abuse, for reasons forgotten.
So on the ride, in the moment she falls into the void, and seemingly disintegrates to her death, Harry also flies into the void from the left, like superman with his wand out, and delivers this exact line, monotone, one more time, entirely out of context and in response to absolutely no one. Canonically to me, he also dies in this pointless act, and as a result I couldn't breathe for the rest of the ride.
Kingsley, while being the second biggest character of the queue, appears once as a crude animatronic at the end, turning Umbridge, who didn't die sadly, to what looks like stone in an underwhelming visual effect, though it's just prison clothes, and a very weird way of delivering a prison sentence at that. Then Hermione and the new elf are standing in an elevator with 3 death eaters cowering in a corner for no explained reason. Then it ends.
It was such a fever dream and I'm both fascinated and bewildered by how the average guest or fan experiences this. I can't quite wrap my head around it in particular for any supposed 'super fans' that might visit for the express purpose of the attraction, robed and scarfed up, dropping dollars on wands and chatting with staff about which house they're in. Are they able to just kick back and think 'yay, Harry Potter ride' without taking on board how poorly written, acted and executed the themed experience is? Am I the unfortunate one with the venn diagram of knowing enough to care and being on the park fan spectrum? Probably.
tl;dr it ain't worth the regular 3-4 hour queues it gets, but it made me laugh.
Speaking of regular 3-4 hour queues, we still had Nintendo land to contend with. This area was perpetually far too crowded and loud to truly enjoy, even at rope drop due to hotel early entry.
Mine-cart misery was already a write-off for the day so we jumped on Yoshi to compensate.
It's a pleasant little sit down, with a bit of interactivity. Short though.
Up some stairs is Mario Kart.
Love the first half of the queue here, tons of easter eggs and detail.
Context.
The wordless pre-show goes on a little too long, while you strap a heavy miner helmet to your face, trying to explain in simple terms - steer and shoot, get 100 coins. Decorations are appreciated again though, even Luigi's vacuum in the corner.
Similar pacing issues apply on this attraction in that the second half of the queue is mind-numbingly slow and boring in comparison to the first half, with added headwear faff. You get that hit of anticipation way too soon and it's long gone before you finally reach the vehicles.
Onboard the headgear gets even worse as you click a visor into place, awkwardly hanging from a musty ribbon cable that you try not to lick. It's chunky and weighty and pulls your head forward, limits your visibility and then off you go into a live tutorial of the pre-show that mostly wasted your time.
The pointing at things with your face to aim and shoot is a cool concept, I even enjoyed it on that weird VR coaster at Tusenfryd and... Battle for Eire?
Didn't like the ride though, it's just so chaotic but not quite in the same spirit as the game. As with a few other interactive dark ride flops of late, I found the learning curve far too overwhelming for the regularity with which you can experience the attraction and, because that's frustrating, just find myself wanting to check out and enjoy the scenery instead.
Some of the scenery is quite nice by its own merit, and the AR, when not just throwing crude kart animations at you, does manage to deliver a couple of neat visual tricks against the physical sets.
I never played any of the games past '64, so most of the tracks were lost on me. Rainbow Road at the end managed to deliver a 3-second hit of tearful nostalgia before they changed the music almost instantly, adding to the overall feeling of having the attention span of a 5 year old. Nah, this ain't it. Did manage to get exactly 100 coins, somehow, but have no idea what this achieved.
I think they tried too hard, overcompensating on the sedate pacing of the vehicles and tight footprint of the layout with overwhelming sensory stimuli. Kill the headsets, make the cars actually dynamic like Test Track and just go all in on a traditional dark ride. If you must do something interactive, make it something cool and physical against the other kart you're racing. We've just queued 90 minutes, give it time to breathe.
Finished with new attractions for the day, we left headache land and took our night laps on Stardust.
Interspersed with a night-time visit to dragon land and lap on the wing gliders.
Which is infinitely more chill.
Then caught the closing fountain show, which is kinda cool too, encompassing the entire main area and street lights. Not too epic, not too sweaty.
That was exhausting, all revisits from here on out at least, so I'll have far less to say. Probably.
Up next - space
