Trip Report: Universal Epic Universe

Universal’s main campus consists of two theme parks, a water park, the CityWalk shopping and dining district, a gigantic parking garage servicing all of the above, and a few hotels all packed into a wedge of land just southwest of downtown Orlando. Unlike Disney World, which sprawls across a vast property the size of San Francisco with thousands of acres of open swamp on all sides, Universal’s campus is heavily constrained in all directions – the highway to the east and south, suburbs to the north and west. In order to expand, they needed to establish an entirely new campus a couple miles south of the main one, on former industrial land reclaimed from Lockheed Martin.

This makes Epic Universe a little trickier to get to – unlike the dedicated flyover exit that dumps you right in the middle of the north campus, driving to EU from I-4 involves a lot of merging and keeping left and following signs and going on an inexplicably circular overpass. Once you do get to the parking lot, the experience feels a lot like the Disney parks parking lots – a vast expanse of asphalt divided into several named sections (I was stuck in the ignominious “Gamer” lot) where parking attendants direct you to the front or back of a double-row of cars. Unlike Disney’s lots, however, there is no parking tram running down the center to help whisk you to your theme park day: you just have to walk. And walk. And walk. In my case, nearly half a mile.

This trek is where EU’s biggest issue first becomes apparent: it’s hot. I’ve never been to a theme park in its opening year before, but apparently this is a common issue with them – new parks are “bald”. Their vegetation and trees haven’t grown in yet, pain points haven’t been identified and given shade structures, everything is just sitting out there baking in the sun. Add in how much hotter Florida’s summers have gotten due to climate change (and, the last few years in particular, the ban on sulfate emissions in Atlantic shipping lanes) and you get a park that is going to be an inferno for much of the year.

The weather when I went was unusually warm for late April, topping out at 93 degrees in the late afternoon, but the dew point was “only” 61°F and it still felt sweltering at times. For much of the next six months, when dew points routinely reach the low to mid 70°s, it’s going to be much worse, and Universal will have to quickly find ways to help people cope. If you’re not a creature of the swamp like me, you may want to postpone any potential visits until the cooler November-February window.

Eventually, the palm tree-lined promenade leads you to an entry gate surrounded by beautiful flowers. These were incredibly fragrant, so much so that I almost suspected it was a fake scent being pumped in until I got close and sniffed them directly. Not even Epcot’s Flower & Garden festival has blooms this aromatic. It’s the first thing that turns the park into a multisensory experience.

Once you reach the flowers, it’s a quick step through security (still using airport-style bag scanners like the main campus does, not the more advanced walk-through scanners employed by Disney and SeaWorld) to the ticket check areas, which are using facial recognition by default. This is one of the big technical innovations of EU – they also, by default, use facial recognition for renting ride lockers, and it worked flawlessly for me. Qualms about the invasiveness of corporate facial recognition aside, it seems to be a much more reliable biometric than the old fingerprint scanners, which would often hold up the line if someone had too much sunscreen on their finger.

After gaining admittance, you see the park icon: the Chronos, an eighty-foot steampunk tower with a spinning orrery and symbols for each World. Within the lore of the park, the Chronos collects celestial energies and uses them to rip open the fabric of space and time to create portals to these other worlds, which is how you’re being transported bodily to them. (This is not conveyed in any way within the “text” of the park itself, but it’s been mentioned in a lot of ancillary material to keep nerds like me busy.)

That’s where we get to the last bit of high-level overview before I get into the specifics of each world: Epic Universe is a huge experiment in theme park design. Ever since Disneyland opened 70 years ago, most theme parks that have the topographical freedom to do so have pursued what’s called a “hub and spoke” design, where themed lands are arrayed in a wheel around a central hub, giving three degrees of freedom at all times: from any given land, you can go clockwise, counterclockwise, or take the spoke back to the hub. Examples of this layout include Disneyland and Magic Kingdom, Animal Kingdom, and King’s Island. When parks do not do this, they often go with a “central lagoon” plan instead, which eliminates the hub and spokes and just leaves clockwise and counterclockwise options from each land – examples of this include Epcot’s World Showcase, Universal Studios AND Islands of Adventure, and Dollywood (with a central hill instead of a central lagoon).

Epic Universe, in a world first, is an “Oops! All Spokes” park. There is a hub, and there are four lands branching off from it, but there is ZERO clockwise or counterclockwise accessibility between those branching lands. Each one has one way in, and one way out, to preserve the illusion that you are really truly in a self-contained different world. This type of cloistered immersive land was pioneered with Diagon Alley at Universal Studios Florida, but it remains to be seen how well crowds will navigate it when it takes over a whole theme park. Personally, I didn’t find it to be terribly inconvenient or claustrophobic, but I was there on a day with a preview audience limited to about a third of the crowds Universal is likely hoping for during full operations.

Now that you have the basics, let’s get on to those five worlds!

The Chronos portal leads you into Celestial Park, the first original non-IP theme park land built in Orlando since Lost Continent and Port of Entry at IOA in 1999. Like Port of Entry, it’s meant to be a fantastical area where explorers from many different backgrounds meet and collaborate. Unlike Port of Entry’s vaguely exotic cityscape, however, Celestial Park is an ethereal, extradimensional realm. Its denizens are not salt-of-the-earth mariners and pioneers probing the far corners of the globe, they’re scientists and philosophers probing the farthest reaches of the cosmos. It’s sort of like Brad Bird’s take on Tomorrowland, a realm outside our universe inexorably drawing the best and brightest to experiment in it, except with copper and green art deco and art nouveau styles instead of mid-century chrome.

Or at least, that’s what they claimed on the podcasts. You’d never know it just by visiting.

According to the forums, there was an entire suite of Celestial Park entertainment playing into the lore of the Celestians and their extradimensional paradise that was unceremoniously axed during Team Member previews, and the result is a land that feels huge, beautiful, and completely empty. Without any actors to support it, there isn’t strong enough environmental storytelling to clue guests into what this land is or why it exists. You’re supposed to feel transported inside Celestial Park just as thoroughly as you are within the four IP lands, but without that texture to situate you, it doesn’t feel otherworldly at all.

The other claim often repeated in promotional material for Celestial Park is that the designers wanted to “put the ‘Park’ back in ‘Theme Park'”, and on that front they succeeded: the vistas and landforms in Celestial Park are beautifully composed, taking inspiration from Frederick Law Olmsted to craft a space with excellent feng shui. The buildings echo turn-of-the-century architecture associated with World Fairs and Expos to achieve a timeless elegance. Everything is backdropped by the towering edifice of the Helios Grand hotel, a new resort which has an entrance directly into the park in another first for the Orlando market (Disneyland has had hotels like this for a while).

The “park” aspect will only be enhanced as the trees grow in and make this area shadier. It already shines at night, when brief fountain shows dance in front of the hotel and tens of thousands of LEDs coruscate in unison. Supposedly there may eventually be a fireworks show here, which would be great.

Without the Celestians to tell their own stories, the only hints you get about the lore come from the two rides in this area.

Constellation Carousel is a charming evolution of the classic merry-go-round, with lovingly sculpted creatures mounted on turntables with poles that rise and fall underneath a canopy of stars.

The animals get surprisingly high off the ground, and there’s a number of different music tracks and ride profiles (I got a dancy techno-ish track that features a maneuver where the entire carousel stopped and then resumed backwards when the beat dropped) which should make it very re-rideable for kids and grownups alike. I’m itching to go back and see what it looks like after dark. Flat rides are typically just filler, but this one had a ton of craft put into it that elevates it to a whole new level.

Stardust Racers is a dueling roller coaster themed, according to the queue voiceover, after the Celestian practice of harnessing comets to use as transportation.

Manufactured by Mack rides, it features two tracks that are each almost a mile long and reach top speeds of 62 miles per hour. I rode both yellow and green sides and couldn’t tell you which one I liked better – they’re both bangers start to finish. For pure thrills it can’t quite match Velocicoaster, and in terms of serene airtime Mako still reigns supreme, but it does a great job of blending those two modes into a hell of a fun ride. The dueling aspect is great and wholly unique in Orlando, the other train always feeling like it’s zipping and darting all around you like an eager friend urging you on. With two tracks loading, it’s a capacity monster with waits that rarely exceeded 20 minutes. I expect it will ultimately be the attraction at EU that I ride the most often.

The other big thing going on in Celestial Park is Food. There was a rumor during construction that Universal originally explored having this land open to the public, or leaving it open after the rest of the park closed, to serve as a version of CityWalk for the south campus. If so, that would explain the incredible amount of food venues located in Celestial Park, some of which have yet to open during this preview period.

I patronized three of these places, constituting almost all of my food for the day. My biggest meal was at Pizza Moon, a quick-table-service where the curse of theme park pizza is somehow broken. These pies are good, and baked in real wood fired ovens, one of which is styled as a crashed rocketship (the whole thing is patterned off a Victorian movie house).

I got the Trip to Vesuvio, featuring “fromage de lune, pepperoni, fennel sausage, roasted peppers and caramelized onions. Topped with cherry peppers, Calabrian chili and fresh arugula. A drizzle of hot honey tops it off.”

I also stopped at CelesTiki, an outdoor bar stand, and drank the Waturi Punch, consisting of “Planteray O.F.T.D. rum, Bacardi Superior rum, orange juice, lime juice, passion fruit puree, honey syrup, angostura bitters, mint sprig, and dried blood orange”. The bartender made it fresh with generous pours, and the drink was refreshing, fruity, sweet but not too sweet.

It was a great way to refresh while listening to the extremely generic entertainment that’s been swapped into the Celestial Park bandshell, a five piece ensemble doing jazzy covers of pop songs.

For dinner, I swung by Oak & Star Tavern, a BBQ restaurant, and got the Huli Huli pork sandwich. The meat was done just as well as at Polite Pig, my standard for theme park BBQ.

All three were very impressive by theme park standards, though also very expensive even by theme park standards. It’s almost impossible to find a meal for much less than $20 at Epic Universe, whereas most quick service at the existing parks and especially at Disney World is closer to $15. As long as there is a commensurate increase in quality, I won’t mind shelling out (I mainly used my Mardi Gras food & beverage discount cards, which save 20% off the price on top of my 10% AP discount), but I don’t think they can afford to let standards slip in any of these kitchens for the prices they’re charging.

Due to the design of the park, Celestial Park is a land you will return to again and again and again. Any time you want to switch from one portal to another, you are obligated to do so by traveling through Celestial Park. That means that I passed through it seven times! It’s a lovely place to visit, but I think that it just needs some extra oomph to make it somewhere that you want to stay.

Dark Universe was by far my most anticipated land. It’s the one I beelined to at opening and the one I returned to first in the evening.

It’s based on an updated version of the iconography of the Universal Classic Monsters films made between 1923 and 1956, and it’s clear in every nook and cranny that the designers love those movies as much as I do.

The only downside is that there’s not enough nooks and crannies – this land is TINY. It’s two little buildings, one little oval, and that’s it. It needs expanding, stat. (The rumor is that there’s an expansion plot slated for a Creature From the Black Lagoon boat ride within the next few years, assuming the park does well enough).

What’s there is great, though. The teeny tiny village of Darkmoor has Dr. Pretorius’ Scientific Oddities gift shop on the left, the one place where I was tempted to buy merch (I’m a tough sell on theme park merch) and Das Stakehaus restaurant on the right (planning on checking it out next time).

In the oval, there are two rides and a bar. The first ride I went on in the entire park was Curse of the Werewolf, a Mack rides free-spinning swing launched coaster themed after the Wolfman movies. This was a last-minute addition to the land after a planned stage show was cut, and it kind of shows in the unsightly netting that surrounds the entire track, but the ride itself is fun. The swing launch, through a barn with static wolfman figures, makes it feel longer than it is and the unpredictable spinning ought to give it some re-rideability. The theming, a “Guild of Mystics” encampment, has some neat details (though the final scene of the ride itself is laughably poorly-themed, they desperately need to punch it up somehow).

At the apex of the oval path stands the forbidding Burning Blade Tavern, where Darkmoor’s monster hunters hang out. Inspired by the burning windmill from Frankenstein, it actually bursts into real flames approximately every fifteen minutes, and it looks sick as hell.

The inside is a cozy space serving bar food like a very garlicky pretzel stake (to ward of vamps, you see). The bar back is lined with the monster hunters’ trophies, and when I was there in the morning a character was wandering around regaling guests with tales of his monster hunting exploits. I asked him about the head on ice behind the left bar. “That Thing?” he said. “I hate that Thing. Rolf carried it down from the mountain. I told him we should just burn it.” I hope these live characters stick around for a good long time, because chatting about the Thing was a highlight of my visit.

The true headliner of DU, though, and really of EU entire for me, is Monsters Unchained: The Frankenstein Experiment. This was the only ride I rode twice. I adore it.

The story is that Henry Frankenstein’s great- (or possibly great-great-? There’s an inconsistency here between preshow and ride audio) granddaughter Victoria has, like Wolf Frankenstein before her, returned to her ancestral home and taken up her predecessor’s experiments. This time she has managed to capture and control almost every monster in the world, and is introducing us tourists to her greatest project yet: the subjugation of Dracula. Of course, as in all theme park rides, things go horribly wrong.

This is only the second ride to use Kuka arm ride vehicles, after Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey in 2010. It doesn’t necessarily feel like a huge revolutionary step beyond FJ, the way other next-gen ride system upgrades like Test Track -> Radiator Springs Racers or Soarin’ -> Flight of Passage have. It’s not even necessarily any scarier than FJ (which is a shockingly aggressive ride tbh). But it is a perfectly paced, perfectly atmospheric, big dumb fun monster mash.

It feels like they’re still dialing in some of the motion profile during this preview period, but I look forward to riding it again and again to see what they change, fix, and upgrade. I wouldn’t even mind getting caught in the queue, which is loaded with interesting details. One room features found-footage style vignettes of how Victoria caught the monsters, and I could have stood there for fifteen minutes to watch all of them if the line hadn’t kept moving.

There’s still a little bit of Darkmoor I haven’t explored (various characters like the Bride of Frankenstein and the Invisible Man do a meet & greet that I never stopped for) but I’m looking forward to wringing as much as I can out of what’s there, and I dearly hope they build more soon, because everything that’s there, from the bathrooms to the barroom, is great.

Super Nintendo World seems like the land with the most hype from general audiences. It’s certainly a bold aesthetic statement: you enter the portal and ride a tall escalator up through the warp pipe, awash in iconic 8-bit sound design. You step out and everything in your field of view is hypercolor artificiality, alive with sound and movement. It really does feel like you stepped into a video game. It’s almost overwhelmingly stimulating.

It’s also hotter than the surface of the sun.

I can’t imagine spending a ton of time in SNW. It feels like a vast playground, but all the things you can play with are gated behind the purchase of a Power-Up Band, a $40 accessory that lets you interact with question blocks, coins, and various little gamified challenges. In Donkey Kong Country I spotted a group of guests and Team Members using their power-up bands to bang on drums to summon an animatronic rhino out of a nearby crate – that looked pretty fun. Maybe I’ll shell out for one when the weather is nicer, but for now pursuing all those little challenges feels like it would give me heatstroke.

The gamification that exists without the Power-Up Bands is a little lacking. On Mario Kart: Bowser’s Challenge, you wear a Mario hat that lets you mount an AR visor in front of your face. The visor projects other racers, environmental effects, and your own launched shells into the space in front of you as you navigate through a series of iconic(? I’ve never played them, I know, I’m a philistine) settings from the Mario franchise.

The problem with this is that the AR elements feel like a distraction from the dark ride scenes, and the dark ride scenes feel like a distraction from the AR gameplay. Once again, overstimulation is the name of the game, and it’s not a game I much enjoyed playing. (I scored 123 coins so I guess I did okay – the people behind me only got 100 and 118). I think next time I ride I’ll just leave the AR visor off and enjoy the scenery without a bunch of glowing Toads floating in front of my eyes.

On the other end of the complexity scale there’s Yoshi’s Adventure, which has a gamified element designed for babies and toddlers but that I played anyway. There are three eggs, and when you spot an egg you press its corresponding egg button. If you somehow miss the eggs, Yoshi will chatter over the onboard speakers and remind you.

This ride is pretty delightful – an utterly gentle procession of multicolored Yoshis trundling around the mezzanine level of the land, giving you a chance to catch your breath and enjoy the scenery. It exists in the grand tradition of the Tomorrowland Peoplemover and the Disneyland Skyway, providing scenic views from above and kinetic energy down below, and it’s exactly what theme park lands need more of.

Finally, way in the back of the land through another pipe tunnel, there’s the subland of Donkey Kong Country, which has a fun tropical aesthetic, a propulsive drum-heavy score, and the second hardest ride to get on in Mine Cart Madness. This is a function of its unreliability and exceedingly low capacity. Using a tried and true theme park trick, I waited until the very end of the night and hopped in line right before the park closed. Even in single rider, it took almost 40 minutes to get on board.

The pitch of Mine Cart Madness is pretty irresistible: using brand new boom track technology, where the coaster rolls on a hidden true track but is elevated on a boom so that it looks like it’s riding on a cartoonish false track, you’ll finally be able to live every Roller Coaster Tycoon player’s dream of having a ride that jumps the tracks and hurtles through the air in all sorts of death-defying ways.

Unfortunately, in execution that doesn’t really come off. I was riding under less than ideal conditions – in the dark, in the back row – but I didn’t really perceive the track-jumping effect at all. Fortunately, even without the gimmick it’s still a good little coaster with lots of interesting scenery and some fun drops. I’ve heard some complaints about roughness, but I didn’t think it was anywhere near as rough as, say, Big Thunder. It’s a fun ride! It’s just not worth the hour+ waits that its low capacity and unreliable operation will inevitably produce.

That’s really Super Nintendo World in a nutshell for me: A cute, fun land that is not really worth the hassle of the crowds it’s going to attract. I don’t have a nostalgic attachment to this iconography to draw me in, so I suspect I’ll only be checking out the rest of what this land has to offer when the crowds are at their very lowest. And since the crowds are usually at their lowest in the dead of summer, I’ll have to try really hard to stay hydrated.

How to Train Your Dragon was considered the most out-of-left-field portal announcement when details for EU first came out. A trilogy of kids films that ended in 2019? Why not just fold it into Dreamworks Land like the rest of its peers at the box office? Some doubted that it made sense to get a full-fledged land, much less, as it came out when the permits were filed, the largest land in the park at a whopping 16.5 acres.

Walking through the portal to see the rugged vista inhabited in harmony by Vikings and dragons, and hearing John Powell’s triumphant score blasting throughout the land, should put any doubts to rest. Much like Pandora: The World of Avatar before it, HTTYD argues for the viability of its existence in a theme park despite broader concerns about the viability of the IP simply by being a cool place you want to hang out in. Even if the movies had never existed, “Vikings + dragons + contraptions” would be a winning formula for a themed environment.

The rides here are a lot of fun. Fyre Drill is an off-the-shelf Mack Splash Battle ride dressed up as a riotously colorful training simulation for putting out accidental draconic fires. You aim your water cannons at rotating targets and try to get them to spin – but the blue ones shoot back at you! I got plenty wet on my ride, but not soaked to the bone like on Bilge Rat Barges – the soakage level was very well calibrated.

Dragon Racers Rally is another off-the-shelf system, an interesting flat ride built on a rotating boom that takes you in swooping canted circles. There’s a lot of material in the queue about how to do a barrel roll, which is a well-known exploit on some versions of this ride in other venues. But at EU the four or five rotations afforded by current ops aren’t really long enough to built up the requisite momentum, which is kind of frustrating.

Hiccup’s Wing Gliders is the marquee attraction for the land, an Intamin launched family coaster that weaves in and around all the other areas. It has a cute storyline where Toothless (represented by a life-sized animatronic) accidentally launches your train before its wings are attached, which results in your zooming around very close to the ground for the whole run. It’s been accurately described as “Hagrid’s for kids” – it’s got a couple tricks up its sleeve that are very fun.

I wasn’t able to experience the land’s fourth attraction, a stage show called The Untrainable Dragon, because it shut down early for the day due to technical difficulties. That’s previews for you. I also didn’t get to try any of the food in this land, which is supposed to be quite good.

There were plenty of cute incidental things though. Characters out and about meeting and greeting, a giant robotic ice dragon, bathrooms that have the E.T. Adventure pine forest smell in them. More than any other land in the park, this one feels huge, complete, and alive. I’m looking forward to spending much more time in it.

This land is where the “preview” nature of the preview really screwed me over. The Cirque Arcanus show shut down early in the afternoon before I could get to it, and the ride is operating via an impossible-to-get virtual queue due to its diminished capacity and… those are the only two attractions! AFAIK there’s not even a streetmosphere show like the Frog Choir at Hogsmeade or the Celestina Warbeck singers at Diagon. Locked out of those two things, all I could do was wander around the huge, impressive, empty streets of Wizard Paris and contemplate just how terrible Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindlewald was.

The only other thing to do in this land is the interactive wand experiences, which are gated behind a merch purchase that I’m not about to buy into now, given how fraught the franchise and its creator are. So until I’m able to do the attractions, this land pretty much remains a big question mark for me. It’s very pretty, and if you ignore the Potter element it’s a recreation of a Paris street that puts Epcot’s France pavilion to shame, so on that level it’s cool.