Triple posting now, I guess I'm the only interested in this ride on here
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I have a few mixed feelings towards the ride. It is in fact a big beautiful new B&M and therefore it will be an awesome, thrilling, and reliable ride for Dollywood, which is what they really wanted right now. However, it's also a bit short in actual ride length, and the drop is not as big as we had hoped, and it doesn't really follow the terrain at all, with the exception of the break run and parts of the final curves. It's definitely not the hyper wing-rider some (including myself) were hoping for, but it does have some nice big inversions and a couple of swooping turns in the trees.
The layout really suggests that they were trying to emulate both SDC's Wildfire and Carowind's Intimidator. It will tower above the park like Intimidator, but it's short, inversion-filled layout with helix finale is very much reminiscent of Wildfire. The more I look at it the more I'm sure that's what the primary influences were for this ride.
As of yet there are no mentions of any thematic elements whatsoever on this ride, which is somewhat odd because all the other B&M Wing coasters that have been announced or built use thematics heavily in their layouts. For DW's to be the only "vanilla" Wing coaster in existence would be quite out of character.
Finally, this ride is going to be heavily dogged by Six Flags Great America's new X-Flight coaster that was announced just a few days ago, which is exactly the same type of ride from the same manufacturer. The comparisons between these two rides are going to be endless as they are built over the course of this off-season. To be honest, X-Flight looks like a more interesting layout upon first glance. It has more inversions, more interesting inversions, and it has interactions with thematics. After all the hype, people were expecting DW's ride to blow everyone away, but in reality it may be simply on par or worse with a Six Flags ride.
Meh, it'll still be a great addition to Dollywood, and I'm really excited to see how the final product turns out, but I can't say I wasn't expecting a bit more after all the hype DW put out there this year... in fact, this is the first time I've felt anything but blown away by a HFEC announcement like this... maybe I'm just spoiled though.
