Friday was a holiday, leaving us with a long weekend, so the boyfriend and I decided on a few days in Singapore. We’ve both been before, but it’s been a long time and we’d never been together. He’d also never been to Universal Studios, so it was a good excuse for me to get a park trip out of it even though there’s nothing new since I was last there about 8 years ago.
It was after midnight when we got to the hotel on Thursday night, but the park didn’t open until 11, meaning we didn’t have to worry about an early morning. I decided on Universal for the 1st day, the Friday, thinking it would be relatively quiet, but it was packed. It was the last day of school before a long holiday, but it seemed that a lot of people had started early. There were also a lot of tour groups. Annoying.
Everyone was heading to the right after the main entrance, so we did the opposite, which worked out well for the first hour or so as we hit the Shrek and Jurassic Park areas with very few people. Some pictures from the walk over to Shrek:
We did Enchanted Airways first, which had a couple of trains’ wait. We skipped Shrek 4D until later in the day – such a piss-poor attraction – and got a walk-on on Puss in Boots before moving through to Jurassic Park.
Canopy flyers was also walk-on, so we did two quick rides to get it both forwards and backwards, while the rapids ride had about a 10-minute wait. Waterworld was closed, which was expected due to info on the website.
Canopy Fliers was more fun than I remembered, but the rapids was way worse. I’d only done it once on my first visit almost 10 years ago, but skipped it on my second visit a couple of years later. It’s just so, so shoddy. The animatronics are s**te, and the grand finale T-rex moment didn’t happen since the T-rex is broken. There’s just this fully visible, clearly broken and very cheap-looking dinosaur hanging above the boat and not moving. S**te.
So far, we were a little over an hour into the visit and had already done three coasters (one of them twice) and the rapids, but I knew that it would be a lot busier as we hit the crowds coming the other way. I went to buy fast passes, but the credit card machine in the shop I went into wasn’t working, which I was later glad of because it would have been quite a poor decision, which I’ll get into later.
Anyway, Revenge of the Mummy.
There was a huge line outside the building, but this was just to get into the main queue rather than part of the queue itself. This was partly because there’d been a heavy, though very brief, thunderstorm as we were waiting for the rapids, which closed Battlestar Galactica and pushed everyone towards the indoor rides. It was also because you need to put bags in lockers and people can’t read signs, so you’ve got a gross situation of staff having to stop 95% of people and direct them to the lockers.
We got inside and joined the 20-minute queue, which ended up taking an hour. Midway through, there were announcements that the main queue was now at 2 hours, with the “Express” line at 45 minutes.
This pissed me off.
They were clearly massively overselling express passes; they almost certainly don’t have any kind of quota. I’m glad I hadn’t bought one since the one I was going to get (use multiple times) was around 60 quid, but where’s the value in that if you’re still in a queue for 45 minutes?
On to Battlestar Galactica then. I’d only ridden each side once before due to it having its famous extended downtime soon after the park opened, and my second visit being during Halloween, having just an evening ticket and not a huge amount of time. This was why I was thinking of the express pass earlier, to hopefully allow multiple rides, but it just wouldn’t have worked that way at all. Sure, the express lines were shorter, but not short enough to make a huge difference to the day.
There was the same faff that Mummy had had: a huge group of people blocking the pathways just to get into the actual queue, which had one staff member trying to deal with people trying to get into both the regular and express queues, sending them away to store bags and then waving a metal detector over everyone.
We ended up waiting about 45 minutes for the “Human” side, which was running two trains, but “Cylon” was two hours thanks to single train operations. I’ve got the cred, so we decided to skip it, but ended up coming back to it a bit later.
Surprisingly. Given the state of Battlestar and Mummy, Transformers was a walk-on. There was also not much of a queue for the special effects thing or Sesame Street ride.
Apart from skipping Cylon, we were pretty much done, but did another circuit of the park to take a few pictures. We also polished off the Shrek 4D thing that we’d skipped earlier and forgotten about. Crap. Such utter crap.
By the time we got back round to Cylon, the queue was posted at 90 minutes. Dreadful, but we decided to suck it up, knowing that we’d probably be annoyed if we missed out on it. It ended up taking 80 minutes.
Battlestar really is an excellent pair of coasters, especially the Cylon side, which rides more like a B&M invert than a Vekoma SLC. I can only assume that the massive problems they had with getting it open is the main reason we’ve never seen anything similar from Vekoma at another park. The biggest problem is capacity. The original trains had 4-across seating, but this was reduced to 2-across, effectively halving the capacity. Combine this with a single train for Cylon (no idea why) and it turns into a bit of a nightmare.
Overall then. I’m sure you can tell by now that I didn’t have the best day. In the past, I’d put this place slightly above the Hollywood park since I’d found it to have a better atmosphere and, for the most part, better rides, but Hollywood has added a lot since my visit while Singapore has been stagnant. Even comparing Hollywood then to Singapore now, I’d re-evaluate my choices and put Singapore dead bottom of the list. It just doesn’t handle large numbers of people well at all. It just wasn’t up to the “Universal” standard.
They’re adding Minions and Nintendo, which will be a huge improvement (the closed area where Madagascar ride used to be is very big), but they also need to look at sprucing up what’s already there, especially the absolute state of the Jurassic Park rapids.
Staff were miserable. Not rude exactly, but just really f**king grumpy and clearly stressed, many doing a job that required at least two people. Overselling express passes also made it miserable for people who had them while making lines longer for those without them. Nobody benefited.
So yeah, very disappointing visit.
Get f**ked.
We had a couple more days, so filled one of them by going to Singapore Zoo. I’d been before, but it’s really decent, so didn’t mind a revisit. In case you don’t know what animals look like:
The highlight is probably their rainforest walkthrough, which has a lot of free-roaming species including birds, lemurs, monkeys, sloths and flying foxes.
There’s a relatively new park next door called River Wonders. We had time, so headed in there as well. It was ok, but could’ve been an extension to the existing zoo really. They clearly want to increase takings by having it as a separate gate. They’ve also put their pandas here, which I also saw as a way to increase gate takings. Anyway, it was fine.
We had a bit of faff after that to transfer to a different hotel. The boyfriend has a rather expensive hotel hobby, so he wanted to stay at Raffles. It’s a tad pricey, so we only did one night there. He paid, so sure, why not? I don’t usually bother including this stuff in reports – probably because I’m usually travelling alone and I’m absolutely fine with a train station Ibis – but I’ll throw this in since Raffles is kind of iconic. It was lovely to be fair, proper old-school atmosphere and service. Made me want to get carried around on a sedan chair while shooting a tiger.
On the last day, we just had a mooch around the Marina Bay area. Nothing we hadn’t done before, but I like it down there.
We also briefly checked out the Jewel (basically a shopping mall at the airport) since it was new since either of us had last been there. Technically, I’d seen it as I’d passed through on the monorail while transferring between terminals on another trip, but it was so early in the morning that nothing was open. It’s fab.
That’s it. Decent little weekend away. I won’t be doing Universal Singapore again though, even with the new stuff since I’ll likely get that done at a better park at some point anyway.
It was after midnight when we got to the hotel on Thursday night, but the park didn’t open until 11, meaning we didn’t have to worry about an early morning. I decided on Universal for the 1st day, the Friday, thinking it would be relatively quiet, but it was packed. It was the last day of school before a long holiday, but it seemed that a lot of people had started early. There were also a lot of tour groups. Annoying.
Everyone was heading to the right after the main entrance, so we did the opposite, which worked out well for the first hour or so as we hit the Shrek and Jurassic Park areas with very few people. Some pictures from the walk over to Shrek:
We did Enchanted Airways first, which had a couple of trains’ wait. We skipped Shrek 4D until later in the day – such a piss-poor attraction – and got a walk-on on Puss in Boots before moving through to Jurassic Park.
Canopy flyers was also walk-on, so we did two quick rides to get it both forwards and backwards, while the rapids ride had about a 10-minute wait. Waterworld was closed, which was expected due to info on the website.
Canopy Fliers was more fun than I remembered, but the rapids was way worse. I’d only done it once on my first visit almost 10 years ago, but skipped it on my second visit a couple of years later. It’s just so, so shoddy. The animatronics are s**te, and the grand finale T-rex moment didn’t happen since the T-rex is broken. There’s just this fully visible, clearly broken and very cheap-looking dinosaur hanging above the boat and not moving. S**te.
So far, we were a little over an hour into the visit and had already done three coasters (one of them twice) and the rapids, but I knew that it would be a lot busier as we hit the crowds coming the other way. I went to buy fast passes, but the credit card machine in the shop I went into wasn’t working, which I was later glad of because it would have been quite a poor decision, which I’ll get into later.
Anyway, Revenge of the Mummy.
There was a huge line outside the building, but this was just to get into the main queue rather than part of the queue itself. This was partly because there’d been a heavy, though very brief, thunderstorm as we were waiting for the rapids, which closed Battlestar Galactica and pushed everyone towards the indoor rides. It was also because you need to put bags in lockers and people can’t read signs, so you’ve got a gross situation of staff having to stop 95% of people and direct them to the lockers.
We got inside and joined the 20-minute queue, which ended up taking an hour. Midway through, there were announcements that the main queue was now at 2 hours, with the “Express” line at 45 minutes.
This pissed me off.
They were clearly massively overselling express passes; they almost certainly don’t have any kind of quota. I’m glad I hadn’t bought one since the one I was going to get (use multiple times) was around 60 quid, but where’s the value in that if you’re still in a queue for 45 minutes?
On to Battlestar Galactica then. I’d only ridden each side once before due to it having its famous extended downtime soon after the park opened, and my second visit being during Halloween, having just an evening ticket and not a huge amount of time. This was why I was thinking of the express pass earlier, to hopefully allow multiple rides, but it just wouldn’t have worked that way at all. Sure, the express lines were shorter, but not short enough to make a huge difference to the day.
There was the same faff that Mummy had had: a huge group of people blocking the pathways just to get into the actual queue, which had one staff member trying to deal with people trying to get into both the regular and express queues, sending them away to store bags and then waving a metal detector over everyone.
We ended up waiting about 45 minutes for the “Human” side, which was running two trains, but “Cylon” was two hours thanks to single train operations. I’ve got the cred, so we decided to skip it, but ended up coming back to it a bit later.
Surprisingly. Given the state of Battlestar and Mummy, Transformers was a walk-on. There was also not much of a queue for the special effects thing or Sesame Street ride.
Apart from skipping Cylon, we were pretty much done, but did another circuit of the park to take a few pictures. We also polished off the Shrek 4D thing that we’d skipped earlier and forgotten about. Crap. Such utter crap.
By the time we got back round to Cylon, the queue was posted at 90 minutes. Dreadful, but we decided to suck it up, knowing that we’d probably be annoyed if we missed out on it. It ended up taking 80 minutes.
Battlestar really is an excellent pair of coasters, especially the Cylon side, which rides more like a B&M invert than a Vekoma SLC. I can only assume that the massive problems they had with getting it open is the main reason we’ve never seen anything similar from Vekoma at another park. The biggest problem is capacity. The original trains had 4-across seating, but this was reduced to 2-across, effectively halving the capacity. Combine this with a single train for Cylon (no idea why) and it turns into a bit of a nightmare.
Overall then. I’m sure you can tell by now that I didn’t have the best day. In the past, I’d put this place slightly above the Hollywood park since I’d found it to have a better atmosphere and, for the most part, better rides, but Hollywood has added a lot since my visit while Singapore has been stagnant. Even comparing Hollywood then to Singapore now, I’d re-evaluate my choices and put Singapore dead bottom of the list. It just doesn’t handle large numbers of people well at all. It just wasn’t up to the “Universal” standard.
They’re adding Minions and Nintendo, which will be a huge improvement (the closed area where Madagascar ride used to be is very big), but they also need to look at sprucing up what’s already there, especially the absolute state of the Jurassic Park rapids.
Staff were miserable. Not rude exactly, but just really f**king grumpy and clearly stressed, many doing a job that required at least two people. Overselling express passes also made it miserable for people who had them while making lines longer for those without them. Nobody benefited.
So yeah, very disappointing visit.
Get f**ked.
We had a couple more days, so filled one of them by going to Singapore Zoo. I’d been before, but it’s really decent, so didn’t mind a revisit. In case you don’t know what animals look like:
The highlight is probably their rainforest walkthrough, which has a lot of free-roaming species including birds, lemurs, monkeys, sloths and flying foxes.
There’s a relatively new park next door called River Wonders. We had time, so headed in there as well. It was ok, but could’ve been an extension to the existing zoo really. They clearly want to increase takings by having it as a separate gate. They’ve also put their pandas here, which I also saw as a way to increase gate takings. Anyway, it was fine.
We had a bit of faff after that to transfer to a different hotel. The boyfriend has a rather expensive hotel hobby, so he wanted to stay at Raffles. It’s a tad pricey, so we only did one night there. He paid, so sure, why not? I don’t usually bother including this stuff in reports – probably because I’m usually travelling alone and I’m absolutely fine with a train station Ibis – but I’ll throw this in since Raffles is kind of iconic. It was lovely to be fair, proper old-school atmosphere and service. Made me want to get carried around on a sedan chair while shooting a tiger.
On the last day, we just had a mooch around the Marina Bay area. Nothing we hadn’t done before, but I like it down there.
We also briefly checked out the Jewel (basically a shopping mall at the airport) since it was new since either of us had last been there. Technically, I’d seen it as I’d passed through on the monorail while transferring between terminals on another trip, but it was so early in the morning that nothing was open. It’s fab.
That’s it. Decent little weekend away. I won’t be doing Universal Singapore again though, even with the new stuff since I’ll likely get that done at a better park at some point anyway.
