Will Moore

Review of Six Flags America

Although Six Flags America has a couple of nicely ...

Although Six Flags America has a couple of nicely themed areas and decent rides, overall visiting this park was an unpleasant and uneven experience. There are a couple of good rides in the front left of the park, including the soaking Shipwreck Falls, the standard river raft ride Renegade Rapids, and the familiar Mind Eraser inverted coaster.

The right side of the park includes a good classic wooden coaster, the Wild One, and a new spinning wild mouse called Ragin Cajun that is pretty fun but generic and will require you to wait in one of the longest lines in the park. The Voodoo Drop ride is very small for a drop ride, although at least it tries to fit in with the whole Mardi Gras theme in the section of the park where it's located.

While the Mardi Gras section of the park was a bit of a letdown, at least they tried to theme the area, unlike the theming towards the center of the park, home of a standard standing coaster, Apocalypse, and a decent wooden coaster, Roar. Once you move past those coasters, however, you enter Gotham City, which is the worst amusement park area I have ever encountered in a theme park.

Gotham City is home to three coasters and the theming in this area is incredibly sparse and nearly non-existent. In fact, besides the walkways, occasional flowers, generic superhero signs, and giant tacky umbrellas, there is virtually no theming in this area besides the empty fields that surround it and this entire section of the park is highly disappointing and detracts from the park as a whole. The coasters in this section of the park include The Joker's Jinx which was closed when I visited, the park's best coaster, Superman: Ride of Steel, and an early flying coaster, the Batwing Coaster.

The reason The Joker's Jinx was closed during my visit is because it had to make an emergency stop that is currently being investigated, although the ride was deserted later on in the week after the incident. Because of this I felt rather unsafe while at the park even though I normally feel safe on rides and that feeling of danger intensified after I saw a ride operator banging on an electrical panel on one of Batwing's ride vehicles to get one of the seats to lock and use their name badge's pin to get that same seat's seat belt to unlock. This kind of behavior by ride operators in front of guests, especially when you're only running one train on all of your rides that should be the best one available, is completely unacceptable and makes for an unsettling park experience.

I ended up leaving the park a couple hours before it closed since it was practically deserted on the Friday in mid August I visited and there were hardly any lines, not to mention there wasn't much to go on. On my way out I stopped by guest relations and told them about the panel banging and they seemed unconcerned and were wondering if I wanted to file an official report or just inform them of the incident but they supposedly relayed it to the rides supervisor. I didn't even bother to mention the incredible lack of theming in Gotham City since they probably don't care, but this sad excuse for a Six Flags better clean up their act before they kill someone or are forced to close once people stop coming here for a handful of rides and a lackluster theme park experience.