Ride Review – Space Warrior

Space Warrior is a shooting dark ride found at Fantawild Adventure parks, with a ride system inspired by Disney’s Toy Story Mania attractions. Cars of 4 guests paired back to back travel between 3D screens, stopping in front of each for a quick game of manic shooting and scoring points before moving to the next screen, and the next, and the next…

One of the more unusual features of Fantawild parks is that they can often be so quiet, a high capacity attraction like this ends up shutting down for 50% of the time and only running on a time slot basis when there are enough guests to justify it. To deal with this, rides of this nature often have a pre-queue ‘waiting area’ with seating, colouring books and a play area to while away the time.

The ride heavily features Duludubi, the blue dragon mascot of the Adventure parks (he even has his own video games). While the on screen visuals are colourful, hectic and a lot of fun, the way each set just forms one of many walls in a clearly obvious warehouse with nothing else in between takes away a degree of immersion from the experience. It’s all about the shooting.

Having ridden Space Warrior before the aforementioned Disney version, I was surprised to learn that Toy Story Mania doesn’t attempt to do this a whole lot better either, so this one probably shouldn’t be penalised too much for that. What doesn’t help matters for me is the existence of Maus au Chocolat at Phantasialand, which takes this whole system to another level in terms of theming.

In it’s own right, this is an fun and entertaining attraction and a bit of a change of pace from any other ride in the park with the interactive features. Everyone loves a good shooting dark ride really.
Here’s a handy list of where you can give it a go.