Before Christmas, I returned to a game I’d given up playing a while back, Theme Park DS. It’s based on a popular ’90s video game that was available on PC and Sega, and has a city-builder kind of gameplay, except that you’re tasked with building a theme park rather than a utopian city.

The reason I didn’t finish it the first time I played isn’t because it’s a terrible game (it isn’t), it’s more that it doesn’t have much to do, and you have to repeat the same actions over and over again.

To give a quick outline, you’re tasked with creating a huge franchise of theme parks that spreads around the world to every continent. You build rides and collect ticket revenues with the goal of getting your theme park up to a certain value, then you’re given the choice to either sell up and move on, or keep building the same park to make it bigger. This is really where things can get a little repetitive. Every time you move to a new country, you need to start right from the beginning, building rides and stalls, hiring staff, adding things like trees and paths, so you can feel like you’re stuck in a rut, going through the same motions. Considering you can visit more than a dozen countries to set up your park, it can be a bit tiring.

That might sound like Theme Park doesn’t have much going for it, but it does have plenty of good points. For a start, the graphics are quite good. They have a little bit of the old 2D kind of look that’s familiar to 90s video games, and everything is built in straight lines, with no option to spin the camera angle at all. Though this might sound like a bad thing, it actually makes the game a little more charming than it would otherwise be, as the developers didn’t stretch the program too far and add things the game couldn’t cope with.

Another nice touch is that you can see the guests wandering around your park, going on the rides and visiting the food stalls and gift shops. These are pretty simple characters, with about half a dozen different guest designs, but it does give you something to watch, and they interact with their surroundings to a point (think about what might happen if someone ate a burger then went on a roller coaster–it does).

Of course, the main feature of the game is the rides. There’s quite a varied selection. You start out with simple rides like a bouncy castle and merry-go-round, and unlock more advanced options like the Big Dipper and Super-Spinner. Some rides and stalls are specific to the country you’re building your park in, such as the London Taxi Tea Company café for Britain (though oddly it’s shaped like a double-decker bus), and the Rio Carnival roundabout for Brazil.

On balance, it’s easy to see where this game was adapted from the PC version, and you can understand why that might have been a big draw for fans of the original who wanted to see their favourite game on a new platform. Then there’s the consideration to be taken into account that the DS has always been a difficult platform for developers who want to create a large strategy or city-builder style game.

For those reasons, and also the fact that Theme Park DS is definitely an unpretentious game that says what it is and is what it says, I’d say it’s pretty good. It’s a nice, simple, enjoyable game to play if you aren’t looking for too much excitement or variety, and if nothing else, you can always just sit and listen to the endless carnival music playing.