Adlabs Imagica Trip Report

[Gazza]

I was in India for 10 days at the start of December for a wedding, so took the opportunity to visit Adlabs Imagica, a park around 70km southeast of Mumbai, near the town of Khopoli.

 A full gallery is to come, but these are just pics I uploaded from my phone without editing or straightening.

Adlabs is the only true “Western Standard” theme park in India, with rides built by well known European and American manufacturers, and notably, having a B&M coaster in the mix.

That said, some aspects of the construction/maintenance/operations weren’t quite there, so kind of felt like Six Flags America (Or below) in parts, whilst in others, the theming was really high quality.

You could sum it up by saying that the southern end of the park had good theming, but the northern end felt a bit amusement park-ish.

 

The park had a well rounded line up of attractions, so didn’t really feel like it was ‘missing’ anything. In fact, it was notable that the place hadn’t been spammed with mini Zamperla flat rides. All of the kiddy stuff was substantial.

 

Allow around 3 hours or so for the journey from Mumbai to the park. I took a train from the famous Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus to Khopoli. Because you have to do a big loop to get off the peninsula and around Thane Creek to Khopoli its a lengthy trip, though only costs 250 Rs (5 AUD).

When you arrive at Khopoli its a fixed 200 Rs fare for a tuk-tuk to the park.

 

The roads are bumpy, and it feels like such an odd spot to put a park, but eventually the park clinging to the hillside and the Novotel appear.

 

I opted for  the fast pass...It wasn’t that busy, but the rides run on a roster system which borders on ridiculous, and I wanted time for the water park, so having the fast pass gives a bit of flexibility.

To give an example, the park was open from 10 till 8, but rides only run from 11-7, and within that, some attractions only operate 2:30-5. Notably, Deep Space was like that, which is an absolute shame. Why operate your best coaster for only 2.5 hours out of an 8 hour day?

 

But, to the trip report.

 

I started with Gold Rush Express, a Zamperla mine train. It was actually pretty good. It went fast, but wasn’t too forceful because the drops and helices were drawn out, so probably the right formula for a good family coaster.

 

Starts of with  a lift hill, elevated turn, then a drop and a continous helix that wraps around an s&s tower. From there is another drop, under the entrance bridge, a couple more turns and into the brakes. The theming was passable with a western town around part of the ride, but a bit crappy looking. They get bonus points for using the buildings to hide the park substation.

 

Next was the big one, Nitro, a B&M floorless coaster, and also my #400th coaster, yay.

The ride is basically a clone of Batman at Six Flags New England, but they have added a helix at the end, and made the first drop steeper. It also only runs a 6 car train. That all said, it’s actually the perfect little ride in terms of showing off B&Ms signature floorless coaster elements.

The main entrance had a racing theme, but beyond that the queue line, station, and shop were a bit ghetto...The shop in particular was one of those sandwich panel buildings they use for railways electrical cabins.

 

But we only care about the coaster itself right? Really good, the first drop is one of B&Ms best, with real kick. From there its a loop followed by a dive loop, overbanked turn, a tight zero g roll, a couple of interlocking corkscrews and finally a helix. The ride packs a lot in, and doesn’t let up.

 

After that I did Alibaba Aur Challis Chorr, which is a shooting dark ride. It has a great Arabian palace exterior, which continues through to the station. The quality of sets was quite good, well kept and ornate.

The cars you ride in resemble these sort of magic carpet sleigh type things, and the cars would rotate during the ride to face scenes. The guns were quite generous, with the dot of your laser pointer actually being a good 10cm wide, with big targets.

The ride passes through an Arabian city, with the targets being bandits. It was like something out of Alladin, with scenes of marketplaces overrun by baddies wielding swords. Eventually you’d chase the baddies out of the city, into the desert, where there were even more of them, until finally you’d reach a cave with their stash of treasure. All of the figures only had basic arm movements or were on turntables, so there was a bit of an old school Disney dark ride vibe to it too.

 

Salimgarh is another dark ride, this one in the form of a haunted house type ride set in an old Indian fort. Again, pretty good set design, and some of the animatronics had some clever moment (Despite being basic), like a chained slave on the floor. Other effects included projection mapping onto the faces of talking busts, spiked walls that would swing in and threaten to squash you, and an entire room that was built as if you were sideways (Eg chandliers mounted sideways on the wall),with the track banking a bit to throw your balance off even more.

Major spoiler, but at the end of the ride you reached a dead end, and there was a section of drop track . It didn’t really fall that fast, but you ended up in the unload area, and had to climb a set of stairs to get back up from basement level to exit the ride.

 

I for India is a Flying Theater/Soarin type simulator, and was the only ride that was built locally.

The ride lifts into position much slower and doesn’t move foward, and the screen is a rectangular one with a slight curve (It was basically like if you turned an old Saab windscreen upside down) , rather than the dome screens used on the others. Unfortunately also, the roll/pitch movements of the seats was not working, so more or less it was an exercise in watching a 10 min film with your legs dangling, with the view of the floor with everyone’s loose belongings scattered in rows. The film itself was well shot and went for a while, but jumped around from scene to scene to lot, though I acknowledge with a country as diverse as India it would be difficult to cut stuff out.

 

Killing time till other stuff opened, I went on the Motion Box Theatre.... A simulator. The film was a wild pedal rickshaw ride along the great wall of China. If you have ever played the level in Crash Bandicoot 3 where you ride a tiger along the great wall, you can imagine what it was like.

 Next I intended to go into the dome theatre, but turns out I had gone into the queue for the Inspector Bow Wow show, which shares part of the same building. This show was like the Donkey Live one at Universal Singapore, or Turtle Talk at Disney, where a comedian voices a 3D animated character in real time, interacting with the crowd. The crowd loved it, but it was all in Hindi so I quietly excused myself after a few minutes.

 

Finally, the indoor Deep Space coaster was open, and it was gold. This layout should be one that Premier Rides clones, because it was the perfect compact mix of force, hills and inversions, and butter smooth to boot.

The ride is in a giant dome structure made of membrane. Definitely gives a nice voluminous dark space, but I dunno how such a structure would go in the event of a fire.

The queue and station was rather short, and had a bit of a crappy space station vibe to it, like when you go to a laser tag centre, but it’s all made out of painted plywood.

 

The premier trains are an interesting one, and require a ridiculous contortive effort to get into. How did they design this? At least the lap bars are comfortable.

From the station, you follow a few low speed turns through the space station, with dummies slumped at computer workstations, computer screens showing gibberish, lasers scanning your car etc...Sort of like how superman has it’s dark ride section at the start.

Eventually you line up to the launch track, which is surrounded by a series illuminated rings which light up in sequence, getting faster and faster as a count down approaches zero. A bit of a push, then wham, the car accelerates very rapidly into a right turn, and up into a zero g roll.

It’s excellent, you go from being pinned in your seat, to weighless, to a good sideways flick due to the high centre of gravity of the car relative to the banking of track. You drop down, do a forceful ground turn, and then into an airtime hill.  There is a trim on the way up, but even so on the other side the airtime is ridiculous before dropping down again. A quick left turn and there is a corkscrew (Again a great kick) then a really tight and forceful 540 degree helix that orbits around a planet sphere piece of theming. Theres one last bunny hop and turn before you hit the brakes.

This ride is a gem, and much more enjoyable than Premiers early Flight of Fear coasters. Again, I’ll reiterate my disappointment the park chooses only to run this ride for a fraction of the operating day.

 

I’d missed the session time for the dome theatre, so did Mr India: The Ride instead.

Another simulator. They didn’t really need to have motion box if they had this.

A bit of background reseach lead me to discover that Mr India is a cult bollywood classic about a hero with an invisibility belt who fights against a villain named Mogambo.

The queue had a bit of memorabilia like costumes and props from the film.

 

I think DWs rumoured simulator could be like this. It was a tiered, 3 level room, with a big screen, and 3 simulators per level, which were themed as whimisical yellow flying cars. You might draw parallels with Back to the Future/Simpsons at Universal, but the simulators didn’t rise up, so it really was just like being in a big room all looking at a big screen, so you could see the handrails in front of you, and the highest tier simulators were a fair way back from the screen.

 

The story of the ride is that Mogamgo has invaded Imagica and taken some kids hostage, so you jump in Mr Indias flying car to save the day. It starts off with an 2D animated preshow before you head off into the main room.

The setting of the battle within the theme park gives rise to plenty of gimmicks (In many ways similar to the Simpsons come to think of it) Eg the car being hit by the pendulum flat ride, being attacked by a dinosaur when you land in the boat  ride, being flung around the roller coaster track etc etc.

 

Overall, it was “okay”, went for a while, but the synchronisation and animation were a bit off. They do get credit for a reasonable, fun, coherent story line....I was able to understand it despite not knowing any Hindi.

 

Wrath of the Gods is a walkthrough attraction with a main chamber with SFX. If you’ve done stuff like Backdraft, Posiedons Fury at IOA, Lights/Camera/Action at Universal Singapore, you’ll have an idea.

 

You are led into a temple, where an explorer appears and runs through a bit of a preshow, eventually discovering a magic disc which unlocks a hidden chamber.

 

This is where the fun happens. The room is circular chamber, and you are standing on a platform surrounded by water. Around you are giant statues. Things get hectic...wind blows through, the platform shakes, fire erupts from the walls and from the surface of the water, projected walls crumble behind the statues. But the worst thing is that full on fountains spray , soaking people in their path. If you ever visit, you can see that the chamber is divided into thirds, with sections themed around wind, fire and water. By luck I was near the fire section, so you don’t cop a soaking (despite the puddles of water on the floor suggesting you might there)

 

It’s pretty full on, but some guests were panicking and trying to get away from the FX (For some context, there is a handrail on the edge of the circular platform, and then another one behind you (So observers were kept in a row around the edge). People were jumping that inner handrail to get away, and designers should have foreseen this and had some sort of more orderly way to seek refuge.

 

Next was Rajasaurus River Adventure.

The queue had a cool archaeological dig section, followed by an indoor part with a bit of a steam punk lab theme. Predictable stuff, you travel back in time to find a dino, travel through a dark ride building with lots of animatronic dinos, before heading up a lift hill, encountering a big bad dino, narrowly making it back into the time machine, and then dropping underneath the jaws of the dino, out of the building, to the splashdown.

 

The indoor section had a bit too much lighting, so it was like being in a giant circus tent (For this ride building they have used a membrane structure) and it looked a bit odd with some of the fake palms being in pots.

A fun attraction, and it has an interesting feature of the load and unload being on separate levels, with an inclined boat carrier conveying boats from the unload to the load, due to the ride being built on a hillside.

 

I finally got back to the dome theatre, which was showing “Prince of the Dark Waters”, in Hindi.

It’s a big circular room with rails to lean on, or you can just  lie on the floor. I didn’t stay for the whole thing, just enough to appreciate the 360 projection and the ability to look around behind etc (Though in this case it did seem like they mostly had stuff happening at the “front” rather than fully utilising the panoramic nature of the format to spread out the characters and action.

 

That was all the major rides done that I was immediately interested in, so I popped into the water park.

 

The water park is further up the hill above the main park, and a skyride exists to convey people up there, but this was not functioning, so you ride an old bus up a winding road to the entrance. And yep, there are cows roaming along the way lol.

 

The park has a Greek Island theme, with whitewashed building with blue roofs, columns along the wave pool and so on, and a nice village area around the entry/locker area. The rides were all from Polin or Whitewater West, however the construction of the park wasn’t the best...I encountered slippey smooth concrete, ground drains that were not really designed to be stood on in bare feet, rusty checkplate staircases etc etc, so you had to keep your wits about you.

 

The main spine of the park was on a mid level, with some slides coming down from the higher bit of the hillside, and others starting at the mid and going further downhill (So those slides had a staircase back up from the bottom)

 

First ride I did was Twisty Turvy a sort of hybrid slide from Polin, where it starts off with a master blaster section, then enters into a sphere type element, where the raft basically washes in and does a u turn on the wall by the force of the water jets inside, exiting out parallel to the entry. From there the tube gets steeper and ends up in a toilet bowl element.

It was actually a really good slide, and the variety made it feel a well rounded and complete.

 

Next up I did Screamer which is a whitewater west rattler slide, like Typhoon at Wet n Wild Sydney. I like these ones because they don’t artificially slow you too much, so in each of the barrel elements so swing and oscillate on the walls very smoothly. I prefer this style to the likes of Triple Vortex.

 

Next was a Tornado style slide called Swirl Whirl. As far as I know this was built by Whitewater West, but cannot be sold in North America due to conflicting with the Proslide patent. Interestingly they were running Proslide cloverleafs.

Overall, the experience was exactly the same, the only difference being to slow the rafts at the neck of the funnel they used a textured slide surface to create friction rather than pumping water in.

 Raaftastic is your generic Polin family raft slide, but was enclosed at the start and had those translucent lighting effects like bands and stars in the fibreglass. Was actually pretty speedy and had good wall time.

The rest of the park was stuff we’ve all seen before, such as a lazy river, rain fortress, Whizzard (Octopus Racer), an single aqualoop, and an enclosed body slide that culminated in a drop at the end.

 

I think I just spent maybe an hour or so looping around and having a go on anything (And a couple of goes on the interesting one) before heading back into the main park.

 

As the sun set I did a few more laps on Nitro, and had a go at Dare 2 Drop, which is a 45m double shot tower. Fairly similar to batwing, but you got two full height bounces, and the directional changes were a bit more aggressive.

 

I also tried Scream Machine was my first experience with a Zamperla Giant Discovery. Nothing really different here to the Frisbees and Gyro Swings I have ridden, except it had automatic restraints, and took a bit longer to reach full swing than the Intamin ones.

 

The rides all stopped at 6:30, despite the website saying 7pm, so after a handful of night shots it was time to go.

[Gazza]

Piccies!

 

https://www.parkz.com.au/parks/IN/Sangadewadi/Adlabs_Imagica/

[Coaster Hipster]

Amazing report! It's also a very valuable one as not many people go to this place, to put it mildly. The park looks quite pretty actually, the landscape work is impressive. Deep Space and Nitro also seems like an exciting coaster combo. Batman at SFNE was pretty meh on both my visits there, but the steeper drop and longer layout are great improvements. Your praise and commentary on Deep Space makes me wish Premier build more of these - their Sky Rocket II is photogenic, but lacks substance imo.

Thanks for sharing the pictures and impressions on this overlooked park

[Gazza]

https://www.parkz.com.au/search/photos/location/park-277-Imagica_Water_Park

The pics from the water park are up now.