The Pinball Wizard

At first, I did not like this game: In the beginning, the price of mistakes is too high, and I got bored playing the first few levels without progressing. After a bunch of attempts, I realized that the leveling-up mechanic is key to progression: in classic RPG fashion, you have to grind a bit to gain enough strength and magical powers to progress. A few hours in, I am enjoying myself, but what keeps this being a 5 star game is: (a) that you have to either be adept at pinball or you have to grind to progress to higher levels, and (b) the zoom and freeze animation for when you grab the key has caused me to lose timing and fall to my death too many times. (Suggestions: have difficulty levels where damage taken is scaled by a multiplier, and put up an exit guard for a few seconds after grabbing the key.)

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While I appreciate pinball mechanics, mixing in action RPG elements makes for a poor combination here. The fact you can die without losing the ‘ball’ is a bad choice especially when it’s difficult to avoid damage. Also, the amount of damage you incur along when losing the ‘ball’ is a bit too high. Part of the fun in pinball is scoring high, shooting lit routes that open up other bonuses, being able to ‘tilt’ the table and keeping the ball in-play. True pinball fans won’t have much to see, as this appears to be more of a novel recipe for two genres that don’t typically go together. Two stars for the effort. I added another star as the Dev read and responded to my review. Also, I’ve still been playing the game and understand the leveling, but there are some situations where it’s game over seconds after having launched at the wrong place at the wrong time. Hope there’s updates on the way to an otherwise fun and sometimes frustrating take on pinball.

I. Love. This. Game. Period. Play this with head phones. The sound design is so wonderful. Ever time a barely or a bad guy is it, the sound seems to come from the direction of the impact. When a series of fast bounces comes into play, you hear shouts back and forth between the left and right ear piece of the head phones. It helps with play as a fast series of bounces is ending, it is hard to tell where the ‘ball’ will be returning from, unless you have the stereo audio. The rogue like aspects of this game are amazing. Seeing the little person run around instead of rolling like a ball is so cute. All the pin ball aspects are there: challenging routes. Unlock bonuses. This often happens by destroying all enemies, lighting all torches, or destroying all the targets. Be prepared to die. A lot. That is kind of what a rogue like is about. But each time, you earn enough xp to come back stronger. Each time playing again, you get a little bit farther. The only downside is the on screen buttons for abilities. Playing without a controller means the buttons often get missed when trying to hit them. It gets frustrating when I time a tap successfully to save from a killer fall, to have missed the button and I died anyway.

This is the best game on apple arcade as of Jan 2020. It’s very well designed and it looks amazing. The sound design is also very funny and fitting. The physics is also great. There are some flaws too. The game is not very balanced. In the beginning it can be challenging (good), but once you get to level 20 or so (which doesn’t take too long) the game becomes very easy and you can get all of the upgrades pretty fast. At this stage getting game over is almost impossible and you can go through the whole game in 20 minutes or so. With that said, the game was very fun, and it’s still fun. I have a bit more upgrades to do until I 100% the game, and I’ll probably stop once I do that. I hope there were more levels and more upgrades. Looking forward to the next game!

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The game tries to to be more wizard than pinball and it hurts the actual gameplay. Getting killed by enemies on the board is frustrating but understandable, it adds an rpg element to the game, that’s the most forgivable problem. The spells are a cool idea but they end up cluttering up the UI more than they end up being helpful. I’ve lost more health to the game interpreting a tap for a flipper as a tap for a spell I don’t even have the mana for. Why not have casting a spell also activate a flipper? Why not make spells gesture based instead (swipe left for dash and right for orb)? Why not disable spells when you’re in range of the flippers? It’s a pinball game, flippers should be paramount but often times I find the game eagerly casting spells as I slip right past a flipper and lose a chunk of my health. Not as big of a deal but I also feel like the orb is just a worse dash, maybe make the orb stick around longer and function more like a multi ball? Also the hit box on the wizard themselves is a bit hard to interpret? I think it maybe the hat which like, I get it, they’re a wizard, but they’re also a ball so I feel like knowing where they’ll hit and how they’ll bounce is more important. Fun idea, a lot of good executions, really cute graphics with a great color pallet, but I can’t play it for more than a round or so without getting grumpy because of these issues.