New For 2018: Pandemonium

Wow, that's a pretty intense angle it spins at! Would love to see local parks get this.

I could see Palace adding one.

Here is a video of Pandemonium and a look at the area around the ride. I don’t like that you have to walk all the way around Pandemonium now to get to Screamin Eagles. The area is very crowded now. But the ride itself looks great.

As the ride becomes a bit more mainstream I'm sure the crowds will die down a bit

So I got to ride Pandemonium today and I just thought I’d share my thoughts:

To start, the ride looks great, colors are vibrant, landscaping is very nice, and overall that whole area looks really awesome and vibrant now. So a big kudos to the park for putting in what had to have been a lot of $$ to revive that area. But the ride itself is really.....interesting.

To start the Pandemonium adventure, we were waiting in line watching the ride and as it was slowing down, a girl on the cycle before us screamed to the line something along the lines of "This ride isn't very good! Go find a different ride!" I thought she might have just been looking for attention but she wasn't wrong lol. Couple that with the bored looks of the kids, teens, and adults alike, we were kind of expecting a less-than-thrilling ride and that's just about what we got lol.

First of all, the operations are painfully slow. They had one girl running the ride and both the gates are padlocked with a lock and key you would buy at Walmart so between unlocking padlocked gates, helping people out, etc. it's a very slow load/unload process. When you get into the ride, its basically just a seating free for all- I don't think I saw 1 ride go with a full 24 riders today because with the lack of assigned seating, it leaves a lot of seats open. For example, the ride before mine had 5 seats open because people sat randomly and the 5 left all were single seats. Great for single riders, but everyone in line was with a group and wasn't willing to sit alone, so the ride went out with about 20% of its capacity gone. Not a huge deal, but with assigned seating, that could have been 2 more groups of 2, or a group of 2 or 3. Again, not a big deal, but if you assign seating, then you will most likely be always full or only have 1 open seat. Luckily the wait was short and so was the cycle (more on that later).

So we got on the ride and the seats and restraints are pretty comfortable. The restraint is snug but not too tight. So the ride started and while it spun on the ground, it went pretty fast and we got some pretty decent forces and I was thinking the ride would be decently intense. But then we started to elevate and it just kind of lost the forces and got boring. The cycle was really short and we only got 2 trips over the top at full height. But even at full height, we really didn't get that weightless feeling that we thought we'd get (I was expecting it to feel somewhat like Supernova). So after the ride stayed at full height for a short time (and I mean short), we came down and spun on the ground a bit more. The ride cycle couldn't have been much more than 1 minute. I get it's new and the cycle can be adjusted eventually, but the line was short and a 2 or 3 minute cycle would have been much better and the wait would still be short. So we got off sort of disappointed.

So all in all, the ride looks great, the area looks great, but it just didn't ride the way I was expecting. Definitely not something I would go out of my way for to ride again. But like I said, it looks great and the area is much improved. So feel free to agree or disagree with me but that's my review of Pandemonium. In my opinion, it's one of the nicer looking attractions they've installed in the past few years, but one of the weaker ones in terms of actual ride experience.

Overall, I thought the park looked really nice. Nice landscaping, clean, and I could tell they did some painting during the offseason.

I was at the park today too and was watching Pandemonium. That ride is really short and operations were terrible on every ride. But the ride does look great even though that area is very congested.

That stinks. Obviously not what anyone wants to hear. I agree they don't need to force a short cycle. the parks attendance is not all that high and they can afford to operate a ride for an extra 30 seconds and not have it be a n issue.

New Pandemonium video Chance is using to promote the ride:

Nice find, Think they could have trimmed it down to half the length though.