Pinball FX - Review

Added April 30th, 2007 by LightK

There’s something unexplainably alluring and addicting about the flashing lights, sound effects, mounting score and manipulation of the ball by nudging the table of a good pinball game. Hungarian developer, Zen Studio, has brought pinball to Xbox Live Arcade. Exciting news, right? Well, read on to find out.

I am a diehard pinball fan and couldn’t wait to put my hands on this game. Thankfully, the file is exceedingly small, rendering download time almost nonexistent. Currently, you have a choice of three tables to play: Extreme (an urban skateboarding theme), Agents (you’re a secret agent and undertake different missions) and Speed Machine (auto racing theme wherein you upgrade your ride for bonuses). More tables will be made available for download in the future.

You have two choices of gameplay: single-player and online multi-player. In both modes of play, classic pinball rules apply – keep the ball on the table by use of the flippers while hitting various targets and ramps. In multi-player, you can compete against 3 players. The objective is to rack up scores faster than your opponents. The host of the match chooses which table to play, the winning score amount and the penalty for loss of each ball. One definite plus is that you aren’t distracted by another’s table during the match. Instead, you have a status bar in the upper left-hand corner that shows you the place of each player and how close they are to winning. During multi-player, you have access to unlimited balls. The downside is that your score decreases a pre-specified percentage amount each time you lose a ball.

Controls are fairly straightforward – LT and RT for the flippers; the A button launches your ball; the X button changes your camera view; and the left thumbstick nudges the table. Even though I cannot imagine a simpler control scheme, after a couple hours of gameplay, my hands and arms began to ache from the continual pulling of the triggers.

Pinball FX does indeed sport Xbox Live Vision support. This enables you to flip the flippers by waving your hands. There’s even a separate leaderboard for camera players. This is certainly a fun addition to the game, but I don’t see many playing this way for an extended period of time.

You can choose from 5 different camera angles. I had difficulty finding a camera view that would allow me to see the entire table. Thus, it was difficult to foresee where the ball was going to go and for me to decide in a split second how I wanted to manipulate the ball with the flippers or nudges to the table.

As in true arcade pinball machines, if you nudge the table too much, you'll cause the machine to tilt and lose your ball. Sadly, the control for nudging isn’t accurate enough to be a very helpful commodity in Pinball FX. The tiniest nudge will cause a danger message to be displayed. Sadly, you can only nudge to the left or right. As most pinball fans know, one of the most important nudges is the “death save” (you bump the bottom of the table to prevent a ball from draining between your two flippers). You cannot attempt this move in Pinball FX.

Beware – I had to turn the vibration off. I normally keep the controller vibration on for gaming, but the vibration in Pinball FX is too intense. This is the first game I’ve ever turned it off.

The ball action is decent. The ball moves cleanly and, when it hits a flipper or bumper in the play area, it doesn’t stick or overlap with the graphics of the other object. The graphics are solid – essentially what you’d expect out of an arcade pinball machine.

I was disappointed in the sound department. The music is repetitive and will quickly grate on your nerves. Hearing “yeah, boyee” in Extreme over and over again almost immediately turned me away from that table. The typical pinball sounds (flippers and bumpers) sound practically identical to their real-life counterparts.

Summary:

Even with all its flaws, Pinball FX is a fun, lighthearted game. If this title were offered with more tables and better camera angles, it’d probably be one of my favorites. As it stands, I still recommend a purchase.