Pinball FX – Review

The original Pinball FX was first released on Xbox 360 back in 2007, over the last 16 years, Zen Studios have done a fantastic job of bringing the joys of pinball machines to our big screens with a wide range of both digitally created and authentic recreations of popular real-life pinball tables.

Pinball FX 2023 launches with a total of 86 tables available, sadly there’s only one free table “Wild West Rampage” which is a great example of digital pinball and while there’s a total of 85 other tables available at launch, sadly you’ll have to get your wallet out, because no previous purchases are carried over, meaning if you’re a dedicated loyal fan who’s spent hundreds on Pinball FX titles, you’ll start with the same clean slate as someone who’s never touched a pinball game before.

When you load into the game, you’re greeted with your Pinball room, from here you can view your tables, access tournaments and events or check out what collectibles you’ve earned as well as access the shop.
Tables are well organised into groups such as Zen originals, Marvel, Star Wars and authentic Williams tables.
There’s obviously a massive range of tables and you’ll be pleased to know there’s a free trial for every machine available, so you can try before you buy. Many tables sit at around the £4 mark, with some at £8 and one (Indianna Jones) an astonishing £12 for a single pinball table.
Thankfully there’s two main ways to get your hands on tables at much better value, with the first being numerous bundles which can bring the prices down to around the £2 mark,

MY personal recommendations are…

1. Zen Originals Collection (£13.24) (9/10)
   A great selection of 7 tables which offer a great variety of themes and styles.
2. Star Wars: Pinball Collection 2 (£19.99) (8.5/10)
   Another fantastic bundle, offering 9 tables, more likely to appeal to Star Wars fans, but you’ll find a great selection of tables, with only 1I really didn’t enjoy.
3. Williams Pinball Collection 1 (£19.99) (8/10)
   A variety of authentic tables, including the fantastic Medieval Madness
   
   That would be a total of 25 tables for about the price of a standard game release.
   We have a full lowdown of all tables and bundles that you can see HERE.

Beyond purchasing tables, there’s also the opportunity to rent access to “most” tables, with the Pinball Pass subscription, this is purchased from the in game shop with the option of 30 days (150 coins / £12.49) or 1 year (1,200 coins / £83.49).
Let’s be straight, I’m a big fan of subscription-based gaming, when Gamepass offers hundreds of games across Xbox, PC and Cloud Gaming for £10.99 a month, but paying even more, just for pinball tables, which is essentially DLC for one game is excessive, greedy and unfair to gamers.

For me, the thing that damages the overall value of Pinball FX, is often, that promised “unreal Engine Remaster” isn’t impressive enough to justify paying again for the same content, so for many players, if you own them on Pinball FX 3, it’s actually going to reduce how much time they invest into Pinball FX 2023.

Cost and value aside, let’s get back to the main game…

Selecting any table, you have access to, you’re given a choice of 8 modes, Classic, Arcade, HotSeat, Practice, Flips Challenge, 1 Ball Challenge, Time Challenge and Distance Challenge.
The majority of people are going to stick with the Classic mode, getting three balls to build the highest score possible, Arcade adds a few powerups and hotseat allows local players to compete, while practice is self-explanatory.
But the 4 challenge modes are great additions, Flips challenge automatically ends your game after you triggered the 200th flipper actuation, 1 ball challenge gives you a single shot at a high score, and distance challenge ends when you’ve accumulated a certain covered distance, but my favourite was time challenge, where you have 5 minutes to work away on a table, if you lose a ball the next is ready to go allowing you to really explore a table and all of it’s bonuses and minigames.
There’s also leaderboards for each mode.
If you really want to compete with others, Tournaments gives you the opportunity to join (or create) user tournaments, to set the highest score, these can be made on any available table and mode, and are playable for a set time-limit from 1 hour to 30 days. You can also limit the number of players (2-32 or unlimited) and even set a limit on how many attempts each player is allowed, there’s also the opportunity for creating password protected entry, which is great for small pinball groups and communities.

Next up are Events, running for around 3 months, each season has a theme, starting off with “Retro Season”, players can join a set number of challenges across various tables and modes working to unlock special rewards of collectible items such as backgrounds, frames and badges for your player card, and figures, statues, carpets and posters for your pinball room.
There’s a total of 15 rewards, with 466 season points required to unlock the last one. You obtain coins for hitting a set score for each challenge, so this could easily take a while, if you maybe made 600 attempts at over 5 minutes each to get 466 coins, you’d be looking at 500 hours, but thankfully many challenges give you more coins, though the targets aren’t always as easy to hit as they sound.

It really pushes back to value, and Zen studios really aren’t giving us much for free here, you firstly have to own the table, but you’ll be expected to invest hundreds of hours, for a handful of collectables that are mostly never going to be seen by others.

What’s really important though is how the game plays, and as you’d imagine over 16 years of making pinball games Zen Know what they’re doing with accurate ball physics.
Having played for over 25 hours on the Xbox Series X, I checked both Quality and Performance modes, and while I’m sure Performance might work better on the Series S for some tables, everything ran perfectly smooth on quality mode for me.

Graphically it’s all down to the individual table, and sometimes, even on some of the dated tables returning from 10+ years ago, the tables look great, other times, even much newer tables can feel a little bland. The free offering of Wild West Rampage is (as you’d expect) a pretty good example of what Pinball FX is capable of with great animations around the table, impressive special effects and some great audio to accompany the experience, even some older tables like the fantastic Medieval Madness seem to play better than ever with this latest version, however it’s a case by case scenario, so you’re highly recommended to download the trial and give your favourite table a test-run before paying for it, because as mentioned earlier, some users may find sticking to Pinball FX3 just as worthwhile.

Pinball FX is a massive contradiction, there’s nothing wrong with it, but when it comes to value, then there’s everything wrong with it. If you ever wondered how a Free game could be poor value, this is the perfect example.
Forcing loyal players to pay again for tables they’ve already purchased on previous titles is really tough, but then charging so much for the pinball pass, just feels like a kick in the teeth.

I can definitely recommend Pinball FX for the accurate representation of pinball, fun extra modes and accessible tournaments and events, and anyone new to the franchise should test out a few trials and consider purchasing a few tables to build up your collection over time.
But for the thousands of gamers who already own Pinball FX3 content, the tough question is, do you pay again, or continue enjoying the content you already own.
It’s a shame that greedy and unfair monetisation is ruining a fantastic pinball simulation.

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