Pinball hits the Playstation 3
Named after developer Zen studios, ZEN Pinball brings the first ever pinball game to the Playstation 3. With four tables, online multiplayer, and a myriad of Leaderboards and tournaments held from time to time, this game certainly promises to be the Ferrari of pinball games.
The gameplay is what you’d expect out of a pinball game. Use flippers, shoot ramps, hit bumpers, complete in-game missions, get a high score. The bulk of your score is going to come from the completion of missions.
There are four tables in the game. Shaman focuses on a witchcraft/natural disaster type theme. El Dorado focuses on a treasure hunting type theme. Tesla focuses on an electrical experiment (for lack of a better way to put it) type theme, and V12 focuses on a car racing type theme.
All four tables have their own unique methods of scoring as well as in-game missions. The in-game missions can involve shooting drop targets, hitting ramps within a certain window of time, and hitting a spinner multiple times within certain amounts of time. This is just a mere taste of the missions; there are far more missions in game.
The game comes with an operators menu, which enables you to change the aspects of a table (playfield pitch angle, mission difficulty to name a couple), but changing these render you ineligible for the leaderboards, so it makes you wonder why the features were included here in the first place. It seems like a waste to me.
The physics here are done fairly well. The flippers are very powerful, which gives the game a nice challenge and makes it very rewarding when you pull off a high score. While not perfect (it’s impossible to replicate real world pinball physics), they’re done quite nicely.
Online multiplayer is also a key feature here. It pits up to four players in a race to a certain points goal. Losing a ball means losing a certain percentage of your points. Unfortunately, the game can randomly freeze on you while in an online match. Also, the game can reset on you randomly.
For example, I can have 2 million points and be in the middle of a potential match winning mission, when suddenly the game just resets my score and the ball mysteriously ends up in the plunger, waiting to be put in play for the first time again. It really is a shame that these annoying bugs have to be a detriment to the online multiplayer, because it really is a thrill when it runs seamlessly.
A good amount of leaderboards were mentioned earlier. The leaderboards this game has are: overall, weekly, best one minute, score speed, and online multiplayer ranking (by table). Best one minute equals how many points you can earn in one minute of play. Score speed is your score per second (total score divided by seconds played). Online multiplayer rankings are done by table, not on a large scale. The fact that the game has weekly leaderboards gives the game infinite replay value.
Graphically, the game looks gorgeous. All of the tables look stunning in 1080i, and they don’t interfere with gameplay.
The sound here is okay, nothing memorable. But I have to give some bonus points here because Zen Studios decided to support the custom soundtrack feature, so this is irrelevant to those who use this feature.
Well, if you like pinball, then stop reading and go download this game already, since it’s probably one of the best to come out in a while. It’s difficult to put it in the same league as masterpieces like Alien Crush, Devil’s Crush and Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection, but it comes pretty damn close.
The Bottom Line:
If you’re not a pinball fan, then this isn’t likely to sway you into becoming one. But even if you like pinball a little, it’s difficult to not recommend this to you. After all, it’s only $10.
Final Score: 8 out of 10
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