A Non-Enthusiast Reviews Every Roller Coaster at Kings Island (That She Wasn't Too Scared to Ride)
Some of them are really really big.
I love roller coasters, but I am not a roller coaster enthusiast - a “thoosie” to borrow their subcultural term. There are two reasons for this. First of all, it’s difficult for me to say the word “thoosie” with a straight face and I believe that I would be thoroughly embarrassed if I ever found myself using it as a self-descriptor. Second, and this is the big one, I basically cannot get on a roller coaster that is more than 200 feet tall. “Hypercoasters” (and gigacoasters and stratacoasters and dear god certainly the one exacoaster in the world) are just off-limits to me.
I want to be clear here when I say that this is the only thing about coasters that sets off my anxiety. Speed is great, inversions are great, I love going backwards, I’m fine with total darkness, I usually don’t even mind an uncomfortable track or seat. It’s just height. Unfortunately for me, I grew up in beautiful Cleveland, Ohio, which meant that any given amusement park daytrip took us to Cedar Point, where height was and is the defining feature of nearly every ride. I like Cedar Point well enough, but I’ve largely been confined to the older wooden coasters and the dreaded “kiddie coasters.”
Not so at Kings Island! I recently made the trek to Cedar Fair’s other wildly beloved Ohio destination park for the very first time and discovered only two coasters that were simply too frightening for me (and a handful that were closed, off-limits to childless adults, or just kind of uninteresting). This was an absolute delight. At long last, a park where I, coward that I am, could have opinions on nearly everything. And boy do I ever have opinions. So here, in loose chronological order, are reviews of every single coaster I rode at Kings Island. No Diamondback or Orion in here. Sorry, thoosies.
The Bat
My beloved and beautiful Cincinnati born-and-raised girlfriend, a hardened Kings Island veteran, recommended that we start our day with something gentle and easy like The Bat, a gentle suspended coaster with a sub-100-foot drop tucked away down a scenic and very long walk through the woods - as an aside, the regular diversions into beautiful wooded areas were some of my favorite moments on our daytrip.
I will not lie to you, reader, because I value maintaining trust in the relationship we’ve formed: I was very scared of The Bat. It’s not a scary ride! It’s not very tall, not very fast, not very forceful. But it had been seven months since my last coaster experience and the lift hill filled me with incredible dread.
I rode The Bat again later in the day after hitting a few other rides and found it much less frightening but unfortunately mostly unremarkable. Even if the walk was reasonably pleasant, it wasn’t really worth the added physical stress on a 12-hour hot summer day. The Bat? More like The Fine Roller Coaster.
The Racer
Things picked up for me after The Bat when we hit The Racer, an opening-day Kings Island coaster that’s been in operation for over 50 years now. My days spent as a coaster coward at Cedar Point have given me a healthy appreciation for older wooden coasters, so I was pretty excited to see one of the more legendary ones.
The Racer is, as the name suggests, a wooden racing coaster designed by John C. Allen, the legendary designer behind my own home park’s notoriously painful Blue Streak (one of my favorites, on account of it’s one of the smallest rides at Cedar Point). Blue Streak is mean, extremely violent and difficult to ride. The Racer was recently fully retracked and it feels awesome.
It’s about as smooth as a 50-year-old wooden coaster can get, and it gives me a little more appreciation for what Blue Streak might have felt like when it was brand new. It’s got some excellent airtime and both tracks feel great.
There was only one track open for our first ride, but we did go back so we’d have the chance to actually race on The Racer, whose long lift hill gave us plenty of time to viciously mock and belittle our adjacent competitors. We won, for the record, due to our overwhelming skill difference.
Mystic Timbers
If The Racer was as smooth as wooden coasters got in the 70s, Mystic Timbers might be as smooth as wooden coasters can get, full stop. I was kind of shocked by how much this one was able to whip around without breaking any of my bones or giving me a headache.
The layout itself is impressive - a brand-new wooden coaster, opened in 2017, long after most of the world abandoned the concept of building rides out of trees - but I really loved the queue, which offered up some impressive theming and worldbuilding centered around the Miami River Lumber Co. and a mysterious, off-limits shed. See, I’m not a roller coaster enthusiast, but I’m definitely a theme park enthusiast, and any time I’m surprised by something that feels like a theme park attraction, I’m very happy.
That being said, the actual storytelling was kind of weak on this one. I’m still not really sure what the shed is supposed to be or why I should be scared of it. The train stops in the shed for a long time but aside from some cool set dressing and a projection of one of three randomly selected monsters on the wall, it feels a little purposeless. It also feels like it’s all building up to one more crazy ride element until you pull into the loading station and realize it was actually just a disguised block zone. A cute way to handle a necessary safety feature but as a show element, disappointing!
Still, the ride experience is pretty awesome and very unlike any wooden coaster I’ve ever seen. We rode it twice and planned on going for a third but ran out of time. I hope more parks keep building new wooden coasters like this one!
Backlot Stunt Coaster
On the topic of theme park attractions, Backlot Stunt Coaster is one of a handful of holdovers from when Kings Island was Paramount’s Kings Island, a genuine Paramount theme park. It used to be themed to, inexplicably, F. Gary Gray’s 2003 remake of The Italian Job, but now it’s got an IP-agnostic studio backlot theme complete with pyrotechnics and cop cars. Fun!
This one is, for the most part, fairly easy riding, but the first launch caught my friend and I completely off guard from the front row. It was the first and only time I’ve ever started to lose vision on a roller coaster, an extremely frightening thing to happen on what’s widely regarded as one of the park’s “family coasters.”
That intensity was a plus for me, for the record, and I made sure to hit this one a second time as well, once again in the front row. When I was prepared for it, it wasn’t nearly as brutal.
Flight of Fear
We actually intended to get on Flight of Fear first thing in the morning because we knew it racked up a notoriously long line, but we ended up getting sidetracked a few times and by the time we arrived, that infamous wait had climbed to about an hour. For a theme park regular like myself, this would normally be nothing, but being a couple hours into a 90-ish-degree day with very little water and having recently had a near death experience on a roller coaster for small children, I was getting slightly anxious by minute 15.
Flight of Fear was actually my most anticipated ride of the day, being an indoor launch coaster in the dark with a heavily themed queue. I’m not scared of any dark indoor coaster, and in fact I delight at the ones with specific and involved theming, probably due to a childhood spent torn between Space Mountain at Magic Kingdom and Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster at Hollywood Studios.
I may have built up Flight of Fear too much in my head. On paper, it sounds like a combination of those two Disney rides, two of my very favorite coasters. In practice, it’s kind of nothing. That “heavily themed queue” stretched far outside where there was almost no theming and when we got in, there was only a small stretch of set dressing that didn’t bring a lot to the table in terms of intentionality. I know Kings Island isn’t a theme park anymore, but even by the standards set by Mystic Timbers and Backlot Stunt Coaster, this was pretty bland.
The ride itself… eh. I love a launch, but the layout was kind of boring and it wasn’t helped by the fact that “in the dark” was even more overstated as a selling point than “heavily themed.” There’s sparse lighting on the ride that is aggravatingly just enough to be able to see the entire track at all times, so the sense of mystery and unexpected thrill was pretty much absent.
Also, I said before that I don’t mind a rough ride, and while that’s mostly true, there were two rides that tested my limits and Flight of Fear was one of them. I was hurting bad by the end of it, and it could really use some updates for comfort’s sake.
This one was a big disappointment for me.
Adventure Express
Looking to redeem the day, we headed for Adventure Port, a brand-new themed area built around an older themed coaster. First of all, I’ve gotta say, Adventure Port is awesome. The theming is head and shoulders above everything else at Kings Island and I found myself heading back there just to hang out and enjoy the atmosphere many times throughout the day. I won’t say it’s on par with a Disney or a Universal, but it was a phenomenal spot to take a break and look around. There were tons of neat details and attractive pieces of set dressing that I simply loved.
Adventure Express, the ride around which Adventure Port was built, was no slouch either. This was probably Kings Island’s strongest ride in terms of storytelling - it’s certainly the only one where I can tell you the “plot.” A cargo company takes guests on a tour to see the beautiful sights of Adventure Port, but something goes wrong (all-time great theme park ride setup, by the way - as a big Universal Studios fan, I love when you’re supposed to take a tour, but something goes wrong). You’re accidentally sent onto track two, the track that goes through the dangerous ruins outside of Adventure Port.
The show elements in those ruins are chintzy and cheap, spears that poke out of walls as though you’ve triggered a booby trap, motionless snakes that hiss at you, that kind of thing. I adore this type of tacky silly stuff.
Like Mystic Timbers, this one has a big show-stopping finale that feels like it ought to lead into one more ride element (in this instance, a lift hill that seems like it’s building to a drop but is actually once again returning you to the loading station). The rest of the track layout isn’t nearly as exciting or smooth as Mystic Timbers, either, so that moment is even more of a bummer.
On pure theming and storytelling, though, Adventure Express was one of my favorite things we rode all day, and I got to it three times just for fun.
Banshee
One of the drawbacks to Kings Island’s relatively short average coaster height is that a ride like Banshee, which has a 167-foot lift hill, really stands out in the skyline. Despite being sub-hyper and well within my comfort zone normally, it was extremely intimidating from off-ride, and I am not ashamed to admit that I had to be dragged onto it kicking and screaming.
Once I was onboard and up that threatening lift hill, though, I absolutely adored Banshee. I’m a sicko for a good inversion and Banshee has seven of them back-to-back. It’s absolutely unrelenting in its intensity, and it was a bit too much for one of my traveling companions.
The only real complaint I have about Banshee is that the restraints are terribly uncomfortable. There’s a tight-fitting vest underneath the overhead restraints that dug into my shoulders, which wasn’t too noticeable during the actual ride, but was extremely apparent during the painfully long ending block zone. My much shorter girlfriend noted that the vest didn’t hurt her, but the larger overhead restraint did dig into her hips, so it seems like regardless of height this one will hurt before you get back to the loading station.
Still, those inversions were so spectacular, both to experience and to observe (my favorite is a loop that circles the lift hill), that I made sure to brave the vest and get on Banshee one more time before the day was done.
Snoopy’s Soap Box Racers
Snoopy’s Soap Box Racers opened this year in the newly rethemed Camp Snoopy kids’ section of the park, which is, by the way, extremely cute and second only to Adventure Port for my favorite place in the park. SSBR, as I will abbreviate it, is another coaster for little ones, but Backlot Stunt Coaster taught me to appreciate that Six Flags doesn’t necessarily go easy on kids.
SSBR is not as thrilling as Backlot Stunt Coaster by any means, but it did have some surprisingly intense moments. The ride has a backwards lift hill into its first drop that was pretty scary from the further-back carts, and after completing the track, instead of looping back to the loading station, the ride runs again but backwards before settling in.
It’s a very cool and novel layout that I’ve heard is similar to Invertigo, a much larger ride that was closed during our trip. I can imagine this thing blowing a small child’s mind. Even as an adult, it was a really cool experience for me.
I wanted to give it another pass, but as you might imagine, the rest of my group was starting to burn out on coasters and wanted to conserve their energy for the ones we hadn’t done just yet.
Woodstock’s Air Rail
We really should have skipped this one. We got on partially as a bit - this was another kid’s coaster in Camp Snoopy, and a much less interesting one. Unfortunately, it seems like Kings Island knows this one isn’t very good, because it had far and away the fewest ride operators and the worst operations of anything we rode all day. We got in what looked like a very short line and waited a very long time for a very bad ride.
Before I said that Flight of Fear was one of two rides that were so rough they physically hurt me. Woodstock’s Air Rail was the second and the worst. I sincerely couldn’t tell you a single thing about this ride’s layout because all I can remember is what I would later describe as “the Peanuts bouncing my head against the wall like a basketball.”
The restraints were also weirdly unintuitive, and we watched several children struggle without assistance to pull theirs down and then struggle again to get out at the end of the ride.
Shockingly, we did not ride this one again.
Boo Blasters on Boo Hill
After Woodstock’s Air Rail, we took a nice long regionally appropriate dinner break at the off-property Skyline Chili. We debated going to the in-park Skyline, but everything costs about twice as much there, and they don’t have the vegetarian options that a regular Skyline has.
The Skyline that we went to was quiet and pleasant and very nearby. The food was good, the service was lovely, it was honestly just a great vibe. I got a vegetarian three-way and a Dr Pepper. It’s right on Waterpark Drive. Great cheap dinner spot, I highly recommend it.
Oh, yeah. Boo Blasters on Boo Hill. It’s fine.
Surf Dog
Another stop on our late-day cooldown tour and another holdover from Paramount’s Kings Island, Surf Dog is a ride that I’ve seen a thousand times at random parks. A cursory google tells me that these are called “Disk’O Coasters,” which is a cute name.
There’s not much to be said about this one - we didn’t even go to Skyline Chili before riding it - but I will mention that the operators were clearly having a lot of fun with it, which made it a memorable ride experience despite being a distinctly unmemorable ride on its own.
I still liked the Snoopy theming. I might just be a sucker for Snoopy.
The Beast
I have poked fun at the thoosies in this piece but let me be clear on one thing: I trust the thoosies one hundred percent of the way. When they said I should ride The Beast at night, I made sure that we scheduled our whole day around riding The Beast at night.
The Beast, guys. The Beast at NIGHT, guys.
I said earlier that before this trip my last new coaster was seven months ago. That was VelociCoaster over at Islands of Adventure. It was also the first time in my little theme park-loving life that I confidently and assertively declared that a roller coaster was my favorite ride of all time, with no qualifiers. It was a moment that made me wish I could do what roller coaster fans do, a ride that made me briefly and earnestly believe that I, too, could be a thoosie.
The Beast made me feel that way all over again. Tearing through the forests around Kings Island in the dark was the kind of experience that made me understand why people dedicate their lives to this kind of thing. A plaque in the queue describes a park guest who rode the Beast thousands of times. I understand that guest on a molecular level.
At one point, The Beast slows down at the top of an enormous hill to give you a beautiful view of the entire park, all lit up and colorful at night. Almost instantly after that, it careens into an element so unexpected for a 50-year-old wooden coaster that I sincerely thought something had gone wrong and I was in danger (I won’t spoil it for those of you who haven’t been).
We tried for a second night ride, but The Beast closes early for Kings Island’s nighttime show, and while it does reopen after the park formally closes, we had a long drive ahead of us and work in the morning, so we wished the coaster a fond farewell.
My haunt-enjoying friends and I had plans to make the trip to Cedar Point for Halloweekends, but after riding The Beast, we collectively agreed to come back for Kings Island’s Halloween event instead for one more night ride. This is a show stopping, monumental attraction. A beast, if you like.
The Final Verdict
The narratively satisfying conclusion to this 12-hour, 18-coaster, 1-Boo-Blast day would involve me deciding to become a full-time roller coaster person, a card-carrying thoosie. That’s not the conclusion I’ve arrived at. I still chickened out on Orion and Diamondback, and I still have no intention of ever stepping anywhere near those evil things.
That being said, I appreciate the hell out of Kings Island for giving me the opportunity to have a real coaster-laden satisfying day at an excellent amusement park without needing to do those rides.
I’ve always felt a little frustrated and excluded by coasters as a concept. I like every single thing about them, and when an excellent one happens to come in under or near that 200-foot barrier, it makes me unbelievably happy. Kings Island gave me that feeling over and over again, and I’m grateful for that.