Chimleong Spaceship, the second gate at Ocean Kingdom, recently opened in Zhuhai, so I popped across for the weekend a few weeks ago, taking in the relatively new Lionsgate Entertainment Complex on the first afternoon, then doing “Spaceship the following day. No Ocean Kingdom this time even though I still need one of the creds there.
Lionsgate
This is part of a new area called Novotown, which is currently just a (very crappy) shopping mall, which includes Lionsgate, a Hyatt hotel, where we stayed that night, and a couple of office towers. It’s a totally empty, isolated, dead part of the city, but there’s more construction happening, so we’ll see I guess.
Lionsgate is spread over three floors in one section of the mall, and is free to enter. It’s a pay-per-ride system, with different packages available, and, as with most things China these days, involves needless faff with QR codes and apps. The hotel had given us 4 ride vouchers, so we used those for two rides and then just did pay-per-ride for a couple of others. The rides are all the same price at around 5 quid each.
Cred first. It’s a powered Mack coaster with VR goggles themed to Gods of Egypt. It was designed from the outset to be a VR coaster rather than adding it later, making it outdated a week after it opened.
I’m not a fan of VR, but this one was especially crap. I kept the goggle on, but the boyfriend took his off and said it was just an empty room, which was of course expected, but that all the lights were also on. I wish I’d just done that as well. Anyway, sh**e.
There was a pretty impressive ropes course, but we didn’t bother with that. There was also some kind of VR haunted house thing which we skipped.
There are some nicely themed areas, including an “old Macau” area. Clearly, they were hoping this would be a much more popular attraction since there were restaurants and a fancy bar that weren’t open. The floor below the bar also had more empty restaurants and what looked to be some kind of nightclub. It’s clearly been designed as an evening “destination”, but has failed miserably since there are just no people. We were there on a Saturday afternoon and saw about 15 other people the whole time.
There’s a decently-themed Twilight area with two attractions. I know I saw the very first Twilight film when it first came out, but that was it. I have no recollection of that one either.
Midnight Ride was ok. It’s another VR attraction, but you’re sitting on a motorbike, so it’s basically a mini motion simulator. You can control the bike to an extent by moving left and right along a predetermined route. The graphics weren’t great, but the ride was of a decent length, the movement matched the video pretty well and it even had a couple of jump scares.
Bella’s Journey was just a pretty straightforward dark ride with a mix of sets, poor graphics on screens and poor animatronics.
We thought that was it, but on the way out saw a Hunger Games thing on the lower level. The ride op described it as a “5-minute movie”, so we almost skipped it rather than drop another tenner, but it turned out to be a “Star Tours/Iron Man” type simulator, only much crapper.
Ok, so as a free-to-enter shopping mall attraction, this is actually a decent enough place. It all looks really nice and it’s cool to just have a wander around. The total lack of people makes it feel a bit creepy though, and the attractions are just all a bit s**t. The biggest gripe is really just how poor the animation/videos are. Pretty much everything here is screen/VR based, and everything is 100% CGI and pretty poorly executed. I think it’s safe to say that Lionsgate just licensed stuff out and had nothing to do with creating the videos. I’d be very surprised if that’s not the case since for a film studio branded park, the actual films shouldn’t be that crappy.
Looks nice; has no people.
Chimelong Spaceship
We had a ferry back to Hong Kong at around 6pm, so needed to get out by around 5. Not knowing how long we’d need, or how busy it would be, we got there shortly after opening only to find not too many people around.
There was a little welcome show with live Christmas music.
The way they’ve organized the entrance to this place is all rather clever. You start off being batched into a huge room with a show based around a spaceship. I think the story is something along the lines of we’re travelling to Earth to see their wildlife or something. We noticed later that there would be ways to skip this whole process, but it’s not obvious and, to be honest, it was all quite cool anyway.
After that, you’re basically following a linear path through the whole place. There are signs asking people not to backtrack, but there’s nothing stopping you from doing that. Plus, each area has exits to the outside, where you could move around and reenter anywhere you wanted really. It wasn’t particulary busy anyway, but by letting the group we were batched with move ahead, and keeping ahead of the group behind, we could get a lot of stuff mostly to ourselves. I’d say that the batching happens at roughly 20-minute intervals.
It’s pretty much just a very big, well-themed aquarium with some shows thrown in on the way around and ending with the amusement park.
This first show was poor. It’s one of those “character on the screen talks to audience” things, but executed very poorly and with very little actual interaction.
More aquarium stuff. They also have a huge manatee exhibit in the park across the road. I think these were a slightly different species though: African manatees since they were in the Africa-themed section. The ones across in the other park are in the Amazon area, so are probably Amazonian manatees.
This show was much better than the first. It starts off with as a blacklight puppetry thing and ends with dancers making silhouette shapes behind screens.
There were also a bunch of automated/animatronic shows that played roughly every fifteen minutes. I love s**t like this. They all had pretty much the same story. Here’s a good guy. Oh no, here’s a bad guy. Good guy wins. This one was some huge space ape thing.
More general aquarium pics:
This show included a couple of live performers and huge animatronic coral reef. It was clearly about saving coral reefs.
This one had two dragons. The pictures are from before the show when it’s not doing anything.
This one had prehistoric creatures. The giant worm thing wants to eat us, but the giant crocodile thing says that we’re friends.
I took some videos of the ridiculousness, so I might look at shoving them in later.
The main attraction here is the Orca show/tank. We missed the first show and didn’t want to/couldn’t hang around for the second one a few hours later. I’m fine with that. When it comes to keeping orcas in captivity, I’m very much against it, but I’m also of the opinion that it’s very hypocritical to judge China for having them just because they’re being phased out in the west. It’s very much a “We’ve already had it, and now we don’t like it, so you can’t have it” attitude which doesn’t sit well with me.
Anyway, they’re in the world’s largest tank, a record taken from the whale shark tank across the street. They have a total of twelve of them: 9 imported and 3 born since then.
The amusement park section looks quite impressive when you first enter it, but the you realise there’s not much in it. There’s easily space for couple of coasters, even something pretty big if they wanted to since it’s a large area to work with.
We didn’t bother with any of the flat rides, but tried out the submarine thing (think those things that a lot of the Legoland parks have) and Bermuda Storm, which is another record holder, this time for biggest motion simulator. They were both fine.
We were done with lots of time left over, so decided to hoof it over to the ferry terminal to get on an earlier ferry. Thanks to the world’s slowest Didi driver, we didn’t get there in time to do that, so had to hang around for a couple of hours waiting for our original booking. Oh well.
Overall then. It could almost be a full-day attraction if you spent a lot of time looking at the animals and were bothered about riding all the crappy flat rides in the amusement park, but for most people, it’s a half-day park despite its massive size. If I were to go back, which I won’t be doing unless they add a coaster or two, I’d probably just show up around lunch time.
If anyone hadn’t been to the resort before, Ocean Kingdom is more of a full-day park, so combining both in a single day wouldn’t really work unless it was very quiet and you didn’t mind skipping some stuff. I’d probably look at the possibility of a two-day, two-park hopper ticket (assuming such a thing exists within their myriad of package options) and doing a half day at Spaceship.
Lionsgate
This is part of a new area called Novotown, which is currently just a (very crappy) shopping mall, which includes Lionsgate, a Hyatt hotel, where we stayed that night, and a couple of office towers. It’s a totally empty, isolated, dead part of the city, but there’s more construction happening, so we’ll see I guess.
Lionsgate is spread over three floors in one section of the mall, and is free to enter. It’s a pay-per-ride system, with different packages available, and, as with most things China these days, involves needless faff with QR codes and apps. The hotel had given us 4 ride vouchers, so we used those for two rides and then just did pay-per-ride for a couple of others. The rides are all the same price at around 5 quid each.
Cred first. It’s a powered Mack coaster with VR goggles themed to Gods of Egypt. It was designed from the outset to be a VR coaster rather than adding it later, making it outdated a week after it opened.
I’m not a fan of VR, but this one was especially crap. I kept the goggle on, but the boyfriend took his off and said it was just an empty room, which was of course expected, but that all the lights were also on. I wish I’d just done that as well. Anyway, sh**e.
There was a pretty impressive ropes course, but we didn’t bother with that. There was also some kind of VR haunted house thing which we skipped.
There are some nicely themed areas, including an “old Macau” area. Clearly, they were hoping this would be a much more popular attraction since there were restaurants and a fancy bar that weren’t open. The floor below the bar also had more empty restaurants and what looked to be some kind of nightclub. It’s clearly been designed as an evening “destination”, but has failed miserably since there are just no people. We were there on a Saturday afternoon and saw about 15 other people the whole time.
There’s a decently-themed Twilight area with two attractions. I know I saw the very first Twilight film when it first came out, but that was it. I have no recollection of that one either.
Midnight Ride was ok. It’s another VR attraction, but you’re sitting on a motorbike, so it’s basically a mini motion simulator. You can control the bike to an extent by moving left and right along a predetermined route. The graphics weren’t great, but the ride was of a decent length, the movement matched the video pretty well and it even had a couple of jump scares.
Bella’s Journey was just a pretty straightforward dark ride with a mix of sets, poor graphics on screens and poor animatronics.
We thought that was it, but on the way out saw a Hunger Games thing on the lower level. The ride op described it as a “5-minute movie”, so we almost skipped it rather than drop another tenner, but it turned out to be a “Star Tours/Iron Man” type simulator, only much crapper.
Ok, so as a free-to-enter shopping mall attraction, this is actually a decent enough place. It all looks really nice and it’s cool to just have a wander around. The total lack of people makes it feel a bit creepy though, and the attractions are just all a bit s**t. The biggest gripe is really just how poor the animation/videos are. Pretty much everything here is screen/VR based, and everything is 100% CGI and pretty poorly executed. I think it’s safe to say that Lionsgate just licensed stuff out and had nothing to do with creating the videos. I’d be very surprised if that’s not the case since for a film studio branded park, the actual films shouldn’t be that crappy.
Looks nice; has no people.
Chimelong Spaceship
We had a ferry back to Hong Kong at around 6pm, so needed to get out by around 5. Not knowing how long we’d need, or how busy it would be, we got there shortly after opening only to find not too many people around.
There was a little welcome show with live Christmas music.
The way they’ve organized the entrance to this place is all rather clever. You start off being batched into a huge room with a show based around a spaceship. I think the story is something along the lines of we’re travelling to Earth to see their wildlife or something. We noticed later that there would be ways to skip this whole process, but it’s not obvious and, to be honest, it was all quite cool anyway.
After that, you’re basically following a linear path through the whole place. There are signs asking people not to backtrack, but there’s nothing stopping you from doing that. Plus, each area has exits to the outside, where you could move around and reenter anywhere you wanted really. It wasn’t particulary busy anyway, but by letting the group we were batched with move ahead, and keeping ahead of the group behind, we could get a lot of stuff mostly to ourselves. I’d say that the batching happens at roughly 20-minute intervals.
It’s pretty much just a very big, well-themed aquarium with some shows thrown in on the way around and ending with the amusement park.
This first show was poor. It’s one of those “character on the screen talks to audience” things, but executed very poorly and with very little actual interaction.
More aquarium stuff. They also have a huge manatee exhibit in the park across the road. I think these were a slightly different species though: African manatees since they were in the Africa-themed section. The ones across in the other park are in the Amazon area, so are probably Amazonian manatees.
This show was much better than the first. It starts off with as a blacklight puppetry thing and ends with dancers making silhouette shapes behind screens.
There were also a bunch of automated/animatronic shows that played roughly every fifteen minutes. I love s**t like this. They all had pretty much the same story. Here’s a good guy. Oh no, here’s a bad guy. Good guy wins. This one was some huge space ape thing.
More general aquarium pics:
This show included a couple of live performers and huge animatronic coral reef. It was clearly about saving coral reefs.
This one had two dragons. The pictures are from before the show when it’s not doing anything.
This one had prehistoric creatures. The giant worm thing wants to eat us, but the giant crocodile thing says that we’re friends.
I took some videos of the ridiculousness, so I might look at shoving them in later.
The main attraction here is the Orca show/tank. We missed the first show and didn’t want to/couldn’t hang around for the second one a few hours later. I’m fine with that. When it comes to keeping orcas in captivity, I’m very much against it, but I’m also of the opinion that it’s very hypocritical to judge China for having them just because they’re being phased out in the west. It’s very much a “We’ve already had it, and now we don’t like it, so you can’t have it” attitude which doesn’t sit well with me.
Anyway, they’re in the world’s largest tank, a record taken from the whale shark tank across the street. They have a total of twelve of them: 9 imported and 3 born since then.
The amusement park section looks quite impressive when you first enter it, but the you realise there’s not much in it. There’s easily space for couple of coasters, even something pretty big if they wanted to since it’s a large area to work with.
We didn’t bother with any of the flat rides, but tried out the submarine thing (think those things that a lot of the Legoland parks have) and Bermuda Storm, which is another record holder, this time for biggest motion simulator. They were both fine.
We were done with lots of time left over, so decided to hoof it over to the ferry terminal to get on an earlier ferry. Thanks to the world’s slowest Didi driver, we didn’t get there in time to do that, so had to hang around for a couple of hours waiting for our original booking. Oh well.
Overall then. It could almost be a full-day attraction if you spent a lot of time looking at the animals and were bothered about riding all the crappy flat rides in the amusement park, but for most people, it’s a half-day park despite its massive size. If I were to go back, which I won’t be doing unless they add a coaster or two, I’d probably just show up around lunch time.
If anyone hadn’t been to the resort before, Ocean Kingdom is more of a full-day park, so combining both in a single day wouldn’t really work unless it was very quiet and you didn’t mind skipping some stuff. I’d probably look at the possibility of a two-day, two-park hopper ticket (assuming such a thing exists within their myriad of package options) and doing a half day at Spaceship.
