Zombie Pinball

« Whether you point fingers at the hectic visuals, foolish mode design choices or terrible gameplay mechanics, absolutely nothing entices you to play one more game, let alone the many it’ll take to unlock more tables. Throw in the annoying backing track and poor voice-overs, and no good can come from playing this game – unless you’re glutton for punishment that is. »

« This is the third pinball game from developers Shine Research that’s come out in a short space of time, and whilst I enjoyed their two previous games somewhat the same unfortunately can’t be said about Zombie Pinball. Don’t get me wrong it can be a little fun from time to time but the game’s problems are too profound and are almost everywhere you look. The main thing I noticed with this new addition compared to the others is that in order to unlock the other tables in the game you have to do a huge amount of grinding. Grinding this much means you lose the fun factor pretty quickly and it definitely makes it difficult to carry on. This is a shame because in terms of the content there is a decent amount for you to sink your teeth into but in order to play the content you have to have a lot of patience. Another thing that will test your patience quite considerably are the controls. Unfortunately the controls don’t always remain responsive and I lost quite a few points because of this which did anger me quite a bit. When you’ve finally grinded enough to unlock all the tables here’s where you’ll find the game to be most fun. There are seven tables in total and each table has quite a bit of variety going for it and at times the arcadey feel to the game does make things become fun. You will notice though that the ball physics are not very realistic at all and the ball never seems to go where you expect it to go, so if you want a realistic pinball experience then I would stay clear of this game. I would also recommend not playing this game for long periods because it does get boring quite quickly. It is however a game that can be enjoyed in short bursts from time to time but unfortunately the enjoyment doesn’t last too long because the game just has too many problems. These problems are further enhanced with the presentation side of the game. The visuals and sound design are not nice in the slightest and the way they’ve implemented the visuals means a lot of the time you can’t even see where the pinball is going or has gone, which in the end is totally unacceptable. At the end of the day Zombie Pinball is without a doubt the worst of Shine Research’s pinball games so far. The previous two pinball games might have both had a few problems but the good thing about them is that the fun wasn’t too far behind. In order to have fun in this game you have to really try and unfortunately it doesn’t last very long and in the end the game just doesn’t do enough to get a recommendation from me. »