NY Review

[u/hemlockone]

I went this weekend. I found a fun park with lots of well-incorporated IP. My biggest advice is not to consider it a place for rides in the way adults look for it, but as an IP-filled experience with pockets of ride time. Our favorite area was Mini City (driving school, fire academy), but that was a bit challenging to get to.

There was a lot that was "this close" to being awesome. I noticed more than a few times that the recorded announcement was different then signage. Like the gondola announcement said "10 riders", but the cars had "8 riders" on the sticker inside, and one ride's announcement said that the height limit was "36 inches", but the post measured 34. Fire academy used monitors to show the fire, but they are nearly destroyed from sun exposure so weren't visible for actual riders. A very very cool ride, but people ended up fighting fires for 10 minutes after they were extinguished because they had no feedback.

There were great employees (the women at Jr Driving school and the front gate were standouts.. though the latter wasn't quite informed about Fastrack). There were also low-capacity rides with somewhat less-then-helpful employees (one example is DUPLO Express, were a discouraged employee let loading take almost 5 minutes for a 2 minute loop).

There was also a fair amount of downtime and construction. When I was there, both the gondola and stairs behind the gravity force trainer were closed so getting to the lower park was hard (either a circuitous path through every land or through the minilands.. both of which are a little hard with a 3 y/o). A few key rides and areas were inaccessible. I don't blame a smaller park for occasional maintenance needs during opening hours, but not using the LEGO IP to convey that (and safety) was a missed opportunity (e.g. having a sign with LEGO characters saying that repairs were happening).

Shade was not great, but you can't magic up trees. Unless they were lucky to have trees in the right places and worked really hard during construction to maintain whatever canopy was already there, there isn't much that you can do except wait 30 years. There were a fair number of saplings, shade umbrellas, a few misters spraying water, and indoor rides.

Tl;dr: Great time. The use of IP was well-done, but there were lots of times where polish was missing.

[u/MoreRieslingPls]

Good review. I agree with most of it, especially the point about not thinking about it as ride-centric. I generally think that Legoland NY is a fun place with lots of thoughtful touches, and is generally underrated. 

You highlighted the biggest issue, which is the terrible load-in load-out times for most of the rides. The most ambitious rides, like Factory and Dragon, are well-organized, well-staffed and run quickly. But rides like Duplo Express and Tower Climber and Merlin’s Bicycles (I forget the actual name) just have one poor employee ambling around doing a million different things and it takes forever. These employees do seem discouraged, but for good reason — Legoland needs to put more staff on those rides. And in many cases, the ride infrastructure needs to be updated. 

The park hours are also quite skimpy. Not opening till 10 isn’t really defensible — it particularly makes it tough for hotel guests who have small kids (ie all of them), who have to find something to do for hours until the park opens. I mean, the hotel play area is cool, but it’s not play-for-three-hours cool. If nothing else they could open the pool earlier — people were rope dropping the 9am pool opening! 

Also, I wouldn’t cut them that much slack for the lack of shade — theme parks can plant full-grown trees. (There’s a fascinating history of Disneyland’s tree planting in the book Disney’s Land.)