Review: Pinball Puzzle
Score:
65%
One of several casual games launched by Bluefir recently, Pinball Puzzle is more akin to traditional Bagatelle, or 'Pachinko', as the Japanese apparently call it. Yes, it involves firing balls into arrays of metal pins and trusting to luck as to which scoring 'bin' they'll end up in, but thankfully there's a bit more to it than that, as you'll see.
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Here's the initial oriental themed playing surface, with two more to 'unlock' should you ever get to 15,000 or 30,000 points (which is unlikely, if my scores are anything to go by). You'll recognise the concept immediately, with a spring-loaded ball launcher handle, with which you can decide how fast to fling each ball up the left hand channel and onto the playing surface:
The basic scoring premise is easy enough, with scoring bins for 1, 5 or 20 points and plenty of metal pins to randomly scatter your efforts among the bins. What gives Pinball Puzzle a slight edge of skill and strategy are the positioning at either end of the bottom line of a 2x multiplier bin and an extra ball bin.
Now, there's sufficient randomness in the pins, plus the two 'pinball' powered bumpers near the top (which give the game its name), that you really can't aim balls into these bonus pins at will, but you can fire balls up hard enough or soft enough that there's more chance they'll end up at one end of the playing grid or the other.
At which point strategy comes into play, since (for example) there's no point in hitting '2x' a number of times if there's no score of consequence to double. So you have to judge balls to get some in the 20 bin and then decide to try and steer things towards the multipliers towards the end of each 25-ball game.
Your balls left, high score and current score are all kept displayed at the top of the screen, the background's attractive and atmospheric, and there's some suitable music looped while you play. This can be turned down using your phone's volume keys or disabled altogether.
And that's about it. The degree of luck needed here is quite high, but as a casual game it fits the bill well for whiling away five minutes in a queue. It's a commercial title, but at only £1 I think the developer has pitched it about right.
Steve Litchfield, AAS, 14 July 2011
Reviewed by Steve Litchfield at