Dragging this topic back from the depths, as I fear it will soon have the [retired] tag next to it.

Chessington have broken this ride. The state it was in yesterday, I feel they perhaps should have just not bothered to open it. This is quite sad, because it was a ride I often looked forward to and would ride a few times in a visit.

First up the queue. It stated 40 minutes, but the line was just to the top of the outdoor stairs leading down. It should also be noted that there is a holding point inside now, which if it hadn't been there, would have meant the entire queue would have been inside the core themed indoor area. My expectations, this was a 5-10 minute queue. Wrong. It was much closer to 40 than it had any right to be. (Edit: for reference, queue time used to be an hour if the queue line hit the actual entrance and used the entire long queue, back when the ride first opened.)

Inside, it seemed strange that they were letting groups of about 8-10 people through at a time to go to the station. When each train can hold around 30 people, this seemed odd, even if holding a car back for RAP. At the station it became clear, of 3 consecutive trains that I saw, there were 4 entire cars roped off and out of action. That's very close to an entire train inoperable. Then it appeared car 2 was to be used by RAP and only RAP. So if no one was waiting for RAP, that car was sent out empty. On the train I was on, there were 10 people taken from the regular queue and 4 from RAP. Fast track now feeds into the main line at the holding point, using an old emergency exit.

Things didn't get much better. This is the worst state I've ever seen the ride, with scenery, effects and audio missing throughout the ride.

In the queue line, one of the TVs showing instructions for the ride had been removed, whilst the other was on standby. In the ride, the boulder no longer works again. The snake room has no smoke, meaning you can just see the entire backstage mechanism that operates the rotating snakes, lit up horrendously brightly. The scene where knives are thrown at you by shadows on the wall, no sound effects at all, in fact barely any audio at all. The final room, it just seemed to be running part of the audio, and felt like someone had just left a portable CD player with a single speaker in there somewhere and removed all of the actual audio system. The ride felt hollow.

Clearly this ride received little to no maintenance over the winter. At least when they gave up on Bubbleworks, capacity remained high, the audio worked and most of the scenes worked. It seems to me they've given up on Tomb Blaster now, and given that 3, of what I would presume the best quality, trains they have, are significantly broken, I'd be surprised to see this continue much longer. If it even makes it to the end of this year.

I think it would be a terrible business move for Merlin to have more Donaldson IP. Unless they outright bought the IP, having so many attractions attached to a single owner, could mean they become really stuck, should anything sour with that relationship or license renewal costs increase.