My Thoughts on the Rage of the Gargoyles at Six Flags

This weekend I finally got my chance to ride Six Flags Great America's Rage of Gargoyles. Well, Here are my thoughts on it.

Overall, it is a great concept turning a roller coaster into a real live video game.

However, for this ride being something they wanted specifically for their "Fright Fest" it wasn't well executed. I'll explain more in a moment.

First of all this is what the ride is supposed to look like when wearing the goggles on the ride.

That looks pretty cool doesn't it?

OK, now for the downside of the ride. For me that didn't happen when I rode it.

It started out fine. I could see the co-pilot in  front of me in the helicopter (he's wearing the white helmet. Staff called him Egghead) in my goggles vision screen. Into the first climb of the coast to race into the first loop, my sister next to me was screaming shoot it, shoot it. I said shoot what? I realized my goggles didn't work. While everyone else was shooting at gargoyles, my guy was stuck in the hangar waiting to start shooting. Then after I going through the first loop my screen went black and I saw nothing the rest of the ride. My googles tried to re-calibrate. but by then it was too late the ride was over.

BOO! That was a complete waste of time.

I will say this, the staff was kind and extended the offer for me to ride it again, but I was  tired, grouchy by that time and was just done with rides for the day.

Come to find out, I wasn't the first person they offered to let ride again either. They had several in the first car load run at 6pm that the goggles didn't work and were let back on to ride. Plus, at each car loading (there were two ahead of me) at what was supposed to take 5 minutes putting on and calibrating the googles to each person, took almost 15 minutes. Also, during that time I saw many exchanging their goggles, at least twice, to get a pair that worked.

Yikes, that's not good. There should be several techs on site for this ride to expedite the service of working goggles. It's not the employees fault for the malfunctioning goggles, but that's not good to see as a rider waiting in line.

The other things you need to know when riding this ride is that it's based on a reserved ticket system and it's first come first served basis.

You can get a ticket to ride by going to the Demon and lining up at 4pm. The first wave of tickets given are for between 6pm -7pm, they'll give those out until gone and continue to give out more in different time frames until gone.

Then you need to get back to the Demon by 6pm to make sure you're pretty close to the front of the line to ride because as I mentioned before the 5 minute of putting on goggles takes much longer and you'll be in line much longer than that.

Again, I had a bad experience. Maybe others didn't.  I want you to be well informed before attempting to ride it in the final weekend of Fright Fest.

If they plan on bringing this ride back around next season whether just for Fright Fest or the whole season, there's much work to be done to make it run much smoother without all the complications.

I'd give this about 2 stars for effort.

Oh one more thing, you will have to get used to hearing the cheesy 1980's Demon theme song, over and over and over again. You will hear it numerous times when waiting in line for the ride reservation tickets and again when waiting in line to ride it.

If you're wondering what it sounds like hear you go. Maybe start listening now for the weekend, if you choose to go. I'm surprised I didn't wake up singing it this morning. HA!