In April 2024 Europa Park in Germany opened their latest roller coaster, the first Mack Striker coaster. I was lucky enough to finally get to ride this incredible new coaster in October this year and in this post I’ll be sharing my thoughts on it.
Firstly, Voltron is absolutely stunning. It’s situated in the new Croatia area of the park (which I believe Europa are planning to expand in the future). The entire ride area, from when you step into the plaza, to the queuing experience (and yes, queueing is an experience in itself) right up to the ride itself is themed in a way that only Europa Park can do.
The first thing you notice as you enter Croatia is the stunning building’s that Europa Park have constructed around this ride, take a look up and you’ll see the track and then the huge Tesla tower they’ve created to theme to this ride.
I said queueing for Voltron was part of the experience and I meant it…whilst Europe Park does offer a limited virtual queue offering through their app and a single rider queue I’d recommend doing the full queue at least once!
With the team at Europa getting trains out every 45 seconds you won’t be stood still for long and there’s a lot to look at in the cattle pen queue including some clever water features in the outside area.
The main event is in the inside part of the queue whereby an impressive animatronic of Nikola Tesla speaks every so often, other moving items animate and, you see some impressive (and quite loud) tesla coils in action. This is truly a unique queue line!
Once you make it to the end of the queue you’re giving a card so you can put baggage and lose articles in a free locker and then you head up to the station where you’re batched into 2’s and 4’s to make loading quick, single riders queue alongside you and everyone is loaded onto the trains which come into the station on a moveable conveyor belt. These are some of the most impressive operations I’ve seen on a roller coaster and whilst the queue took me an hour if it was in a Merlin-run park it would have taken at least 2!
The Voltron trains have 4 rows and each row seats 4 guests, they have lap bars which makes for a comfortable experience. I managed to ride Voltron 4 times including a night ride and during that time had 3 rides on the outside-overhanging seats and 1 on an inner seat (I tried rows 2, 3 and 4).
Once the train moves out the station there’s a sequence where the train bounces with the idea being that it’s being powered with the electricity…this is absolutely unnecessary but a lot of fun and I loved this sequence (although only experienced it on 2 of my rides…more on that below).
You then get launched out into the beyond-vertical launch and straight into a loop (1 of the 7 inversions on this coaster) which hits speeds up to 62mph. A few more twists, turns and inversions later and it’s into another launch where you’ll go into some airtime hills and twists and turns before hitting the breaks…but it’s not over!
At this point you enter a building and onto a turntable which turns you around and then ejects you backwards up a half-pipe piece of track, then back through the building and out the other side on (what felt like) the punchiest launch of the whole ride. This building is, in my opinion, the weakest part of the ride and could certainly do with some smoke in there!
Finally, you’re off to some more airtime hills, twists, turns and your final inversions before hitting the break run coming in at around 3 minutes for the entire ride.
Check out this video from Coaster Studios if you want to see a full POV
I have to say, my first ride which was on the outside of row 3 left me a little underwhelmed and was pretty uncomfortable/shaky. Back when the ride first opened a number of people said the same thing and Theme Park Worldwide spoke to some staff and shared in their vlog that some trains didn’t have the suspension package on the outside seats…which wasn’t dangerous but did make some rides a bit rough.
It seems like a few months later and in order to keep operations fast this has still not been fixed and I confirmed this by having some much smoother rides on other cars on the outside seats (it seems to be car 1 to avoid at the moment…not that you have a choice…just hope you don’t get car 1). Likewise, car 1 doesn’t seem to do the ‘bounce’ sequence at the start of the ride…of my 4 rides 2 were on car 1 and neither had that sequence but other rides did. I hope they’ll fix this during their winter maintenance at the start of next year.
After getting in 4 total rides on Voltron it is certainly one of the best roller coaster’s in Europe and up in my top 5 (it didn’t knock Energylandia’s Zadra off the number 1 spot though).
From start to finish Voltron is full of fun elements, smooth turns (if you avoid the outside seats of car 1) and punchy launches. For a three minute coaster there really are no dull moments and it leaves you coming off and wanting to go around again!
If you get a chance to go out to Europa Park and ride Voltron then do it…I’ll certainly be doing it again soon!
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