Long report coming up, but with loads of pictures.
The plan was to hit up this place the weekend before we actually went since there was a public holiday in Hong Kong which could’ve meant a hopefully quiet Monday at the park, but then a friend decided to change the date of their wedding (who does that so close to the day?), and Jeremy was the best man, so we couldn’t exactly not go. Anyway, we ended up having to go the weekend after, hitting the park on a Saturday which wasn’t ideal.
I’d been looking at queue times on the Universal Beijing app, and they were, predictably, horrendous at weekends, so we opted to prebook the highest level of express pass, which allowed for one ride on pretty much everything, since they’re limited and seemed to sell out a few days in advance.
There were huge queues just to get through security, but these moved quickly and efficiently. It was clearly going to be a very busy day though. When booking the tickets, I’d had to give my passport number, so the passport itself actually acted as the ticket. They then took a picture at the gate, and then all the express pass queues used facial recognition to enter them. It all worked really, really well.
My first thought was to head to the Jurassic World dark ride, get a regular ride in, and use the express pass for a reride later, but the queue was already at 80 minutes. We’d arrived at the security check a few minutes after opening, so getting to the park before that would’ve been better.
Anyway, it was clear that we’d just be using the express passes immediately, so there was no need to be strategic at that point. I decided to hold off on Jurassic World until later – saving the best for last and all that – so did Jurassic Flyers first, which had a 75-minute queue already. The mountain that houses it is a very impressive focal point it has to be said
The coaster itself was better than I thought it was going to be, but it really is such a wasted opportunity in terms of theming. It’s fairly obvious that the walkways underneath most of it were some kind of health and safety requirement added after the fact, but they really do ruin the thing.
We’ll get to you later:
Even though it was included on our express pass, Lights, Camera, Action was walk-on anyway. Apart from the preshow, it’s pretty much the same as the one in Singapore, but seemed to be executed better, with the effects seeming to happen more quickly / less jankily.
We were near the theatre for Untrainable, a show based on How to Train Your Dragon, about 15 minutes before a show was due to start, so just headed in there.
It was seriously impressive. It’s all in Mandarin, obviously, but it’s not difficult to work out what’s going on. Having said that, some kind of subtitling wouldn’t go amiss considering it’s a Universal park in a city which gets a decent number of foreign tourists. This was true with all the attractions. They had subtitles on safety videos (guessing it might be a legal requirement), but not on anything else (shows, preshow videos etc.) Anyway, the show:
Still ignoring the bigger attractions for now, we headed into the Minions area to grab the cred and Minion Mayhem. The cred, Loop-Dee-Doop-Dee (love it), I found out later was a Jinma coaster. It rode perfectly. Minion Mayhem was a clone of the Florida version, which was itself a retheme of a very old ride system, so it seemed very outdated here.
Lines for both were at around an hour each, but the express pass made them a walk-on. This was one thing I loved about their express pass; they hadn’t oversold them, meaning that there was very quick access to those people who had them, but not much of an imposition on those without. Singapore needs to take a look, the money-grabbing bastards.
Another show: Sing on Tour. I’ve never seen the Sing films, but this show was camp as tits and I loved it. It’s a singing contest (two acts actually singing live and another two prerecorded) hosted by an animatronic koala. The audience were getting well into it as well. I don’t know if it’s because the films/characters are popular in China or the show itself has gained some kind of following, but it was all getting a massive reaction.
I decided I couldn’t hold off any longer, so headed for Jurassic World. This was the first time we had to wait in any sort of queue - this and a handful of other major rides are included in some lower-tier express passes – but we were still on in around 15 minutes compared to the regular queue which was hovering around 2 hours by this point.
Loved it. Best dark ride in the world? Definitely a contender. The only thing for me that I didn’t like so much was some of the screen-based stuff towards the end. Starting with a screen but then going into “live” action worked fine, but going back to screens later kind of takes you out of things. Small gripe though; the ride is excellent.
Cred! Decepticoaster was decent. I’ve done Hulk before, which I liked, but I still wasn’t massively excited for this. It was good though. I remember Hulk not being the smoothest, especially for a B&M, but this one was really smooth in the back seats. It’s still a bit disappointing that this is the park’s only major coaster, though.
I’d forgotten that Transformers was here. Although it’s undoubtedly an excellent ride, I’m a bit over it now.
I had no idea that the Kung Fu Panda area was completely indoors. It’s all quite lovely. I have no idea why the boat ride was a walk-on (didn’t bother with the express pass queue) when everything else in the park had huge queues. Sure, it has an excellent capacity, but to have literally no line at all was weird. I guess we could have hit it at a strange time since the whole “land” was dead.
Onto what was, predictably, the busiest area of a very busy park: Harry Potter. Sooooooooo many people around the park were wearing the outfits, more so even than in Japan, and they love playing dress up over there. No exaggeration when I say that probably around 15-20% of the park guests were dressed in Potter robes.
Cred. Would’ve been a 75-minute wait. This is the Mack Youngstar version at least.
I did Forbidden Journey by myself since Jeremy had done it in Osaka and hated it. Fair enough since it really is quite nauseating. While it’s obviously an amazing attraction, I like it a bit less every time I ride it now. Now that the wow factor has been dampened slightly, you start to notice that the ride narrative – or lack of one – isn’t up to much. The lack of attempt to hide the show building from certain angles is also a bit of a shame.
Waterworld had been closed when we’d been in Singapore a few months prior, so we made sure to see it here. Yep, same as all the others (but in Chinese), which isn’t a bad thing since it’s a really decent show.
By this point we’d done pretty much everything, so just did a bit of a circuit of the park to take it in at night. Rerides weren’t really an option because of the queue times, but we ended up riding the “teacups” ride in the Transformers area. The huge animatronic “ride op” in the middle is pretty impressive.
They had one, ONE, walkthrough for Halloween, but it was just impossible. You had to register for it on the park app after 3pm, and because there were just so many people, it kept crashing and slots filled up extremely quickly. They had a few costumed characters around the entrance area as well, but that was about it. People were obviously up for the Halloween stuff though, so maybe they’ll do something bigger in future.
Overall thoughts then. It’s an excellent park with an unfortunately poor coaster selection. That doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things though. Even though I might be slightly tired of Forbidden Journey and Transformers, to have both of them in the same park alongside Jurassic World Adventure is really very impressive. If you were to make a list of world’s best dark rides, all three of those would appear in many people’s top tens.
Despite the park being insanely busy – possibly the busiest park day I’ve ever seen – it was run very, very well. No Happy Valley/Fantawild bulls**t going on here when it came to ride ops; it was very much a Universal park. The express passes, while very expensive, were also well worth it given the crowd levels. As I said earlier, unlike Singapore, they don’t oversell them, which benefits both the express lines and the regular queues.
It makes it all the more frustrating to hit the local Chinese parks after this kind of experience though since you realise that the way they run things (terribly) has nothing to do with local laws/restrictions; the park operators are just bastards.
Since we were staying not too far away from Sun Park, we had a quick look there the next day. It’s the kind of place which you might expect a surprise new cred to pop up, but that wasn’t the case. It was all the same old crap since my last visit, with the two oldest coasters – the mine train and jungle mouse – seemingly SBNO, adding further fuel to the “20 years” regulation that some of us suspect is the case in China.
Using an old haunted house building to house a kiddy go-cart track was an inspired choice.
I rode the Beijing Shibaolai motorbike coaster so that the park visit wasn’t a complete waste of time and to see if it was as awful as I remembered. It was.
The end.
The plan was to hit up this place the weekend before we actually went since there was a public holiday in Hong Kong which could’ve meant a hopefully quiet Monday at the park, but then a friend decided to change the date of their wedding (who does that so close to the day?), and Jeremy was the best man, so we couldn’t exactly not go. Anyway, we ended up having to go the weekend after, hitting the park on a Saturday which wasn’t ideal.
I’d been looking at queue times on the Universal Beijing app, and they were, predictably, horrendous at weekends, so we opted to prebook the highest level of express pass, which allowed for one ride on pretty much everything, since they’re limited and seemed to sell out a few days in advance.
There were huge queues just to get through security, but these moved quickly and efficiently. It was clearly going to be a very busy day though. When booking the tickets, I’d had to give my passport number, so the passport itself actually acted as the ticket. They then took a picture at the gate, and then all the express pass queues used facial recognition to enter them. It all worked really, really well.
My first thought was to head to the Jurassic World dark ride, get a regular ride in, and use the express pass for a reride later, but the queue was already at 80 minutes. We’d arrived at the security check a few minutes after opening, so getting to the park before that would’ve been better.
Anyway, it was clear that we’d just be using the express passes immediately, so there was no need to be strategic at that point. I decided to hold off on Jurassic World until later – saving the best for last and all that – so did Jurassic Flyers first, which had a 75-minute queue already. The mountain that houses it is a very impressive focal point it has to be said
The coaster itself was better than I thought it was going to be, but it really is such a wasted opportunity in terms of theming. It’s fairly obvious that the walkways underneath most of it were some kind of health and safety requirement added after the fact, but they really do ruin the thing.
We’ll get to you later:
Even though it was included on our express pass, Lights, Camera, Action was walk-on anyway. Apart from the preshow, it’s pretty much the same as the one in Singapore, but seemed to be executed better, with the effects seeming to happen more quickly / less jankily.
We were near the theatre for Untrainable, a show based on How to Train Your Dragon, about 15 minutes before a show was due to start, so just headed in there.
It was seriously impressive. It’s all in Mandarin, obviously, but it’s not difficult to work out what’s going on. Having said that, some kind of subtitling wouldn’t go amiss considering it’s a Universal park in a city which gets a decent number of foreign tourists. This was true with all the attractions. They had subtitles on safety videos (guessing it might be a legal requirement), but not on anything else (shows, preshow videos etc.) Anyway, the show:
Still ignoring the bigger attractions for now, we headed into the Minions area to grab the cred and Minion Mayhem. The cred, Loop-Dee-Doop-Dee (love it), I found out later was a Jinma coaster. It rode perfectly. Minion Mayhem was a clone of the Florida version, which was itself a retheme of a very old ride system, so it seemed very outdated here.
Lines for both were at around an hour each, but the express pass made them a walk-on. This was one thing I loved about their express pass; they hadn’t oversold them, meaning that there was very quick access to those people who had them, but not much of an imposition on those without. Singapore needs to take a look, the money-grabbing bastards.
Another show: Sing on Tour. I’ve never seen the Sing films, but this show was camp as tits and I loved it. It’s a singing contest (two acts actually singing live and another two prerecorded) hosted by an animatronic koala. The audience were getting well into it as well. I don’t know if it’s because the films/characters are popular in China or the show itself has gained some kind of following, but it was all getting a massive reaction.
I decided I couldn’t hold off any longer, so headed for Jurassic World. This was the first time we had to wait in any sort of queue - this and a handful of other major rides are included in some lower-tier express passes – but we were still on in around 15 minutes compared to the regular queue which was hovering around 2 hours by this point.
Loved it. Best dark ride in the world? Definitely a contender. The only thing for me that I didn’t like so much was some of the screen-based stuff towards the end. Starting with a screen but then going into “live” action worked fine, but going back to screens later kind of takes you out of things. Small gripe though; the ride is excellent.
Cred! Decepticoaster was decent. I’ve done Hulk before, which I liked, but I still wasn’t massively excited for this. It was good though. I remember Hulk not being the smoothest, especially for a B&M, but this one was really smooth in the back seats. It’s still a bit disappointing that this is the park’s only major coaster, though.
I’d forgotten that Transformers was here. Although it’s undoubtedly an excellent ride, I’m a bit over it now.
I had no idea that the Kung Fu Panda area was completely indoors. It’s all quite lovely. I have no idea why the boat ride was a walk-on (didn’t bother with the express pass queue) when everything else in the park had huge queues. Sure, it has an excellent capacity, but to have literally no line at all was weird. I guess we could have hit it at a strange time since the whole “land” was dead.
Onto what was, predictably, the busiest area of a very busy park: Harry Potter. Sooooooooo many people around the park were wearing the outfits, more so even than in Japan, and they love playing dress up over there. No exaggeration when I say that probably around 15-20% of the park guests were dressed in Potter robes.
Cred. Would’ve been a 75-minute wait. This is the Mack Youngstar version at least.
I did Forbidden Journey by myself since Jeremy had done it in Osaka and hated it. Fair enough since it really is quite nauseating. While it’s obviously an amazing attraction, I like it a bit less every time I ride it now. Now that the wow factor has been dampened slightly, you start to notice that the ride narrative – or lack of one – isn’t up to much. The lack of attempt to hide the show building from certain angles is also a bit of a shame.
Waterworld had been closed when we’d been in Singapore a few months prior, so we made sure to see it here. Yep, same as all the others (but in Chinese), which isn’t a bad thing since it’s a really decent show.
By this point we’d done pretty much everything, so just did a bit of a circuit of the park to take it in at night. Rerides weren’t really an option because of the queue times, but we ended up riding the “teacups” ride in the Transformers area. The huge animatronic “ride op” in the middle is pretty impressive.
They had one, ONE, walkthrough for Halloween, but it was just impossible. You had to register for it on the park app after 3pm, and because there were just so many people, it kept crashing and slots filled up extremely quickly. They had a few costumed characters around the entrance area as well, but that was about it. People were obviously up for the Halloween stuff though, so maybe they’ll do something bigger in future.
Overall thoughts then. It’s an excellent park with an unfortunately poor coaster selection. That doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things though. Even though I might be slightly tired of Forbidden Journey and Transformers, to have both of them in the same park alongside Jurassic World Adventure is really very impressive. If you were to make a list of world’s best dark rides, all three of those would appear in many people’s top tens.
Despite the park being insanely busy – possibly the busiest park day I’ve ever seen – it was run very, very well. No Happy Valley/Fantawild bulls**t going on here when it came to ride ops; it was very much a Universal park. The express passes, while very expensive, were also well worth it given the crowd levels. As I said earlier, unlike Singapore, they don’t oversell them, which benefits both the express lines and the regular queues.
It makes it all the more frustrating to hit the local Chinese parks after this kind of experience though since you realise that the way they run things (terribly) has nothing to do with local laws/restrictions; the park operators are just bastards.
Since we were staying not too far away from Sun Park, we had a quick look there the next day. It’s the kind of place which you might expect a surprise new cred to pop up, but that wasn’t the case. It was all the same old crap since my last visit, with the two oldest coasters – the mine train and jungle mouse – seemingly SBNO, adding further fuel to the “20 years” regulation that some of us suspect is the case in China.
Using an old haunted house building to house a kiddy go-cart track was an inspired choice.
I rode the Beijing Shibaolai motorbike coaster so that the park visit wasn’t a complete waste of time and to see if it was as awful as I remembered. It was.
The end.