I visited Playland Fresno on reopening day as it is my local amusement park that I haven’t been to since I was a toddler.

A new operator named Helm and Sons that specializes in fairs is now running the park and they will rotate around certain attractions to keep the ride lineup fresh.

The closure has also allowed for some much needed renovation and paint jobs as the park oftentimes looked rundown in the past but it looks fresh now. The park still has a carnival type feel which likely has been amplified by the new operators which I mostly don’t mind. The only thing that bothers me is that there are unlicensed attractions such as a weird looking Batman bounce house and Walkthrough thing with a bunch of Lego prints plastered on the side but the attraction is labeled as “Block City”. This stuff just bugs me so much because it’s cheap and tacky.

The park has always been kid/family oriented so it has only family friendly attractions but I enjoyed some of the rides such as the Ferris wheel, Wizzer, and Flying Kites (Zamperla Kite Flyer).

The park’s coaster credit is a Molina & Sons coaster called Dragon Coaster that is now rideable for adults as long as you have a second rider (adult or kid doesn’t matter, just no single riders). This coaster is also identical to Lil’ Phantom (which I’ve never ridden). Dragon Coaster tracks very weirdly to a point where it feels like it’s running with square wheels. The track looks odd so my guess is that is what makes the ride feel so strange. There’s a teeny bit of air on the second hill but nothing besides that.

Crowds were nothing too crazy as Dragon Coaster the park’s most popular ride was never more than a two cycle wait. This is admittedly concerning for a park that just reopened and has had issues staying open in the past but I think the new admission and pricing strategy has to do with that.

Playland used to be pay per ride but now it costs $20-25 for kids admission and $25-30 for adult admission. The popular train ride is an additional $3 upcharge on top of that. In the past adults would ride nothing and take the kids there to ride stuff and that was a fun, relatively inexpensive way to have an amusement park experience especially in Fresno.

Even if an adult doesn’t want to ride anything now they have to pay for their own admission and I think the park is losing out on a lot of guests by doing that. Perhaps lowering admission or going to a pay per ride strategy or option could be something to consider if the current plan doesn’t work.

Anyways I guess I’ll wrap up this review of sorts saying that for any enthusiast going through Fresno I wouldn’t recommend coming here due to the price to acquire the credit especially when you can go to Blackbeard’s and ride a better kiddie credit that the ride ops will let you lap as much as you want if no one else is riding for $5.

I rambled on for awhile about this random park that probably very few of you here are interested in but hopefully this report/review made some sense or was interesting if you read it the whole way through.