Day Three

Another day, another set of parks to visit. This time it's Motiongate and Real Madrid World.

Well, mostly Motiongate, as Real Madrid World is a freebie, you get when booking Motiongate.

With Universal, Disney, and Warner Bros. World taking up most of the Movie Intellectual Properties, there's not much left if you want to make another theme park centered around film.

Motiongate made it work by picking up most of the remainder, such as Lionsgate films, Dreamworks, and Columbia Pictures.

Most of the park is outdoors, except for the Dreamworks section, and it became a race to get to a queue line as quickly as possible, as those were air-conditioned.

We started with Lionsgate films, owner of The Hunger Games, Now You See Me, and John Wick.

As is tradition, we started with a coaster, based on the transportation between cities in the Hunger Games.

I haven't seen the movies, so I just took it as an extremely fun launch coaster.

The John Wick coaster was out of commission for today, so we did the Now You See Me one next. They had to turn it on for us, as we were the only ones in this section of the park.

Next up was Columbia Pictures land, which housed a Ghostbusters dark ride with a really good queue.

A launch tower based on Zombieland, with a cool picture of the rules.

And a dark ride in a castle, and I can't remember the movie it was about, some child movie I hadn't seen before. The dark ride was mostly through empty rooms with static displays, a bit of a waste of such a nice castle!

They had a rapid river, based on the Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs movie. For a water ride in a hot-ass country, we stayed suspiciously dry.

We made our way to the indoors Dreamworks section for lunch through the Smurfs section, which is mainly aimed at kids, but it had a fun little dark ride and a kiddy coaster.

We had a delicious lunch at the Kung Fu Panda section indoors, Nasi and Kung Pao Chicken, before we headed to the Shrek section.

It was still awfully quiet in the park, but it was a bit busier in the indoor section as most people seemed to flee from the heat outside.

The Shrek Dark Ride was really good; they made a great choice to show the characters as puppets on strings, which works really well with the movements animatronics make. It was one of the best dark rides of the trip!

A big surprise was the "Train Your Dragon" section; the theming was amazing!

And the ride was a super fun Mack coaster, which has only three operating in the world. One is in Europa Park, another in Universal Studios, China, and another here. And with this one, I've done them all :)

Speaking of good coasters, the Madagascar section, themed as a circus, has the second-best coaster of the trip, a launched spinning coaster, with a fun surprise at the start.

This one also had the longest queue of the day, at five minutes.

We circled back to Kung Fu Panda World for a simulator, where you board a raft and go down a river. It was pretty fun!

And with that, it was time to take a buggy to the next park, Real Madrid World.

We only did this park instead of Legoland next door (which were the two options for the freebie) because this one has a brand new wooden coaster (which was really good!).

The rest of the park... not so much. I mean, you're really driving yourself in a corner with such a specific topic for your theme park. And to waste a million-dollar trackless ride system on a few lame screens of how Real Madrid players battle against aliens is just an utter waste of everyone's time and money.

The same can be said for the "experience of how it is to make a ball" 5D movie experience. Basically, the whole park is a ploy to funnel you into the gift shop to buy club merch.

If there were 20 people in the park, it was much; most of the people we encountered were employees. It was one of the weirdest experiences here.

After a re-ride of the wooden coaster, we had enough and returned to the hotel for a dip in the pool.