DarKoaster — Attraction in Williamsburg

Do not spend more than 30 min waiting for the ride. It is not worth the wait. It has a decent speed ups, but no G forces. They kept quite a bit of the original castle architecture for the queue but with far less interactive themeing like the original Dark Kastle preshow.

The ride itself is boring. It has an interesting seat design, looking like snowmobiles, but there are so few seats the ride queue backs up. In addition, it's an indoor coaster with no indoor elements. There are about 3 pink halloween skeletons in the entire ride, all in one spot. The rest are screen projections, and extremely minimal ones (like an archway or a spooky face). The projections are poorly blended into the ride, as the edges are very visible especially around the spooky face video. You can also clearly seeing the light and where the video is being projected from.

The lighting in general is exceptionally poor for an indoor ride. Verbolten is an indoor/outdoor ride and yet the indoor portion is properly dark enough to hide most of the indoor architecture. DarKoaster is the complete opposite, where there is so much light pollution that you can see nearly the entire track. Even the exit pathway comes right up near where the coaster ends and you can see into the showroom entirely.

It's surprising how much advertising was put forth for such a lackluster and disappointing ride. It is an absolute downgrade from Dark Kastle and a poor homage to the original dark ride. The only good thing about it is the A/C, which you can just retreat to...

I rode this opening year (2023) and waited well over two hours to board. You inch forward because the two trains hold only 10 people. Fine.

You get to the front of the queue and get excited again. It was my first time on a pretty rare straddle coaster, so I get even more excited. The ride begins and the thrill declines.

The circuit is actually fun, but the queue is far better themed than the coaster itself. It would help if there was so much theming that you'd want to ride again to see what you've missed!

Nope. You can ride it once and never get on again simply for the wait time.

My friend felt the same.

I returned on 07/27/24 with a new friend who hadn't ridden, so I was willing to give it another go (again... it's kinda fun).

The line was much shorter so I'm excited again, but the wait time -NO! There was a moment when we didn't move for over 20 minutes. People were snaking up the line just to glimpse of what the we kept waiting for. Hoards of people were leaving while we ALL awaited an announcement.

An employee even came out and I asked, "Is the ride broken?" She responds, "No. we are not closed." Still, no movement and more people leaving the ride. (Even the Quick Queue hadn't moved).

We waited some more before deciding, that after an hour, enough of our time was wasted, and abandoned our place.

Some update would have been nice. I will never ride DarKoaster again. I don't discourage others to try it at least...

We waited about 90 minutes to get on this ride which was disappointing because the sign outside said the wait time would be only 30 minutes. I can't really recommend this ride as being worth it for any wait time over 30 minutes.

The design of the ride vehicle is fairly unique so that it feels a bit like riding a snowmobile. Riders are positioned side by side with 5-6 rows, so each train only carries up to about a dozen people. I'll explain why this is important in a moment.

The ride is dark except for a few light-up skeleton or ghost figures which are pretty underwhelming. The track features two launches which give a nice thrill but beyond that it's a few dips, dives and banking turns. The ride actually runs you through two laps on the track but the second lap isn't all that exciting especially for a coaster with a modest top speed and no real drops. If not for the second lap this ride would be crazy short, definitely under a minute.

Given that the train holds ~12 people and does two laps, it means that the pace of clearing the line is extremely slow. They can't run multiple trains simultaneously like on most coasters. Unless you can join the line and immediately get inside the covered area you will have a long wait - it's better off skipping and coming back later when the line is short.

Overall I think this ride is a miss and...