I use the Griswold system to rate a park and it's rides. This ranges from -3 for bad to +5 for good. 0 means I like a ride, but only just.

The Park

Pay-One-Price: 0

Now, I don't like saying this; indeed, it's the first review in which I've had to mention it, but here is a park that is almost a complete waste of time. It's only 25 minutes away from where I live, but I hadn't visited for over 5 years because I had been so underwhelmed the first time. I was hoping that things had improved since then, but sadly they hadn't.

The park markets itself as American Adventure World, but the half-dozen themed areas that try to give this impression are only patchy at best. For example, inside a couple of the buildings are wall murals of Western stagecoach scenes, but put steel girders and garish blue carpeting in the same room, and the effect is just instantly lost. Similarly, the buildings are of the typically-Western rustic wooden type, but the park has placed catering vans directly in front of them. I don't recall Billy the Kid or Butch Cassidy ever stopping off for a kebab whilst en-route to rustle some cattle or rob a bank. My own opinion is that theming is best done properly, i.e. lots of it to make it convincing, or not at all. A park that does something in between, like American Adventure has done, just makes itself look amateurish.

Then there are the rides - or more accurately, the lack of them. The park has one of the smallest collection of white-knuckle rides of any park in the country. If you visit on a quiet day, as I did, then after about three hours you'll have ridden pretty much everything that's worth riding at least once, if not several times. Therefore, it's probably not worth spending the whole day here. A better idea would be to take advantage of the parks late opening until 7pm, and only visit for half a day. Children have got slightly more to do however, as there seems a slightly disproportionate number of rides for them. Given that you would be struggling to spend a full day in the park, the entry fee of £13.50 is relatively expensive, though the park does have firework displays and Western shows too. Also, to be fair, you do get a voucher for a ride on the Skycoaster and Supakarts attractions, which are usually an extra charge. The place was also quite clean, and very easy to navigate, as there is only one path round a large lake.

The Coasters

Twin Looper

Type: Steel, Single Out & Back
Features: Double Loop
Manufacturer: Soquet
Opened: 1995
Inversions: 2 -2 vertical loops
Ride Time: 1m 55s
Max Speed: 40 mph/ 65 kph
Highest Drop: 60 ft/ 18m

Rating: 0

Don't be fooled by the ride time of nearly two minutes, as this is not a long coaster at all. A fair amount of that time is spent on the slowest, creakiest, and noisiest chain lift I've ever had the misfortune to experience. It would be quicker if the riders pushed the train up it, and then hopped in at the top, Olympic bobsled-style. The first, and indeed only, drop is OK, curving down and right, and the two back-to-back vertical loops give reasonable positive G forces. I found the second one to be marginally better than the first.

The coaster then traverses a couple of the most pointless helixes I've ever seen on a coaster; it pootles around them so slowly that there are no lateral G's at all. It's the coaster equivalent of a grandmother doing her knitting on a Sunday afternoon. It would almost be better if the train went straight back into the station after the inversions, such is the abject lack of thrills. The train also spends a fair amount of time sat on the brake run, which again makes the ride appear longer than it really is.

Indeed, the ride only gets a marginally positive rating due to the OK G's on the loops, and the fact that it is not too rough, though this is doubtlessly due to the low speed. I must also mention that two seats in the back car face backwards, but the amateurish nature of the park is demonstrated by the fact that they haven't got any special queueing area for them, so it's pot luck as to whether to manage to ride in them or not. I tried to queue for them, but was abruptly told by the ride operator to fill other empty seats in the train. It's the same principle as the theming: if you're going to have something slightly different on a ride, then you have either got to manage it properly, in this case having a separate queue line, or dispense with it altogether.

The Missile

Type: Steel, Shuttle
Features: Multi-Element, Two Lifts
Manufacturer: Vekoma
Opened: 1989
Inversions: 6 -1 vertical loop, 1 boomerang. Each is ridden forwards and backwards.
Ride Time: 1m 45s
Max Speed: 48 mph/ 80 kph
Highest Drop: 125 ft/ 38m

Rating: -1

Another Vekoma boomerang, but this one has defiantely deteriorated to a "boomerbang". After the first drop and the trip through the station, the ride immediately gets rough, especially the boomerang inversion, which is even worse backwards. There are more G forces in the vertical loop than on other models, however, and this just about saves the ride from an even worse rating.

Other Rides

As I've mentioned previously, there are not many other rides worth bothering with at the park. The Buffalo Stampede (0) powered coaster is a ride children will enjoy, though the buffalo "theming" is bordering on the embarrassing, with two lone buffalo and one Indian with an arrow being the sum total of the park's efforts. The same can be said of the other powered coaster at the park, the Runaway Train (-1). This ride goes through a couple of tunnels, which beg to be dressed up as old mine workings, but instead there is no theming at all. It's also rather rough, which is quite an achievement for a powered coaster.

Similarly, the Nightmare Niagara log flume (0) should be so much better. It's still the highest triple-drop log flume in the world, and therefore one of, if not the only, signature ride the park possesses. There is a bit of theming in one of the underground sections, but not much. The Rocky Mountain Rapids (0) were another water ride that was disappointing, as absolutely no water came into the boat at all. It was the driest rapids I've ever ridden. The only way to get wet on these would be to jump into the channel.

The Motion Master Cinema (0) is yet another example of the park not exploiting the potential of it's rides. The idea is excellent, a theatre with moving seats, but using the film of a roller coaster is a poor choice. We all know that a coaster feels like, so the imitation doesn't feel realistic at all. Instead, a film of a spaceship, whilst perhaps rather generic, is better suited to this type of ride. Far worse is the Neptune Theatre (-3), a diabolically bad 3D cinema, which started off at an abysmal level and somehow managed to get worse. I could go on for ages, but the initial observation that the 3D glasses were kept in a bakery bread delivery tray did nothing to shake off the feeling that this park was really amateurs at play. Then there was the film itself, a very poor attempt at an underwater ocean adventure, which tried to make a political statement about man being the most dangerous creature on the planet, but merely made me want to dive into the nearest ocean in order to escape. The 3D effects were also non-existant - no fish leaping out of the screen forcing you to duck, nothing like that. Indeed the film was exactly the same without the 3D glasses as with them.

The park also has a Skycoaster, Supakarts, and a couple of thrill rides, that I didn't bother to go on, as I was looking forward to other things, like lunch at Burger King and work the following day. I never like to criticise a park, if for no other reason than they contain roller coasters. However, the American Adventure could do so much more with the rides that it possesses, by theming them properly and then promoting them. After all, the park is in one of the best locations in the country, in the Midlands and only 15 minutes from a motorway. I never thought I'd say this, but Six Flags, where are you? Despite their parks being extremely generic, that would surely be better than what American Adventure currently offers.

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Andy Rathe

from how your review sounded, it seems as if it might be another 5 years until you visit again.

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I want to go to John's Park.

I used to visit this park in the early/mid-90s, and The Missile seemed like a decent ride at the time. Not overly exciting, but good enough to be the park's main coaster. After all, it was built before that other Midlands park, Alton Towers, had even built Nemesis.

It's shocking how American Adventure has not tried to build a better coaster since, and the quality gap between parks has grown. Even if you prefer the Twin Looper, it's not a more spectacular, elaborate ride than The Missile. It's more like they just bought something cheap for a higher quantity of thrill rides. Sigh, they seem to no longer have the ambition to be a competitive park at all.

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"Stop saying you threw a monkey into the sea."