Ever since I was a young boy, I’ve played the silver ball…
I’ve been playing pinball games for over 50 years, getting my start at the early age of ten when my dad would park me in front of the row of pinball machines at the local American Legion with a handful of quarters while he played pool and drank beer. I wasn’t very good, but when you get five balls for a quarter you didn’t have to be. My relationship with Zen Studios isn’t quite that long but rest assured, I have played every iteration of all their pinball games on all available platforms and have all (100+ now) tables for the various systems. Pinball FX is also one of those games that never gets uninstalled, as you never know when pinball fever is going to strike.
Pinball FX VR is my third deep dive into virtual pinball, and until its recent release I was stuck with the original Pinball VR Classic and Star Wars Pinball VR – not a bad place to be stuck because those games are still fantastic. Playing pinball in VR solves numerous issues found when playing on a traditional screen. The whole vertical versus horizontal conflict, along with trying to figure out which camera view works best for you is no longer a concern. You now get “real” life-size pinball machines that you can walk around, study, stick your face into the playing area, all in the comfort of your own room using some fantastic mixed-reality (MR) features of the Quest 3 or create your own custom underground arcade.
The best thing about playing Pinball FX VR is that you have total situational awareness of the table at all times. Playing on a traditional screen you have to opt for a top-down, non-scrolling camera view to get this same perspective. This helps tremendously with complicated, multi-tier table designs where the ball can easily go out of view, but not in VR. The refresh rate of the headset combined with some responsive touch controls means you’ll be setting all new high scores in no time – even on tables you may have already mastered.
Speaking of tables, your initial $10 purchase gets you the game and three classics; Pinball Noir, Curse of the Mummy, and Sky Pirates: Treasures of the Clouds. There are eight other tables available as DLC purchases, so if you fall in love with Pinball FX VR like I did you can immediately start to rebuild your library with popular licenses from Star Trek Next Generation, Indiana Jones, Adams Family, Twilight Zone, World Cup Soccer, and a Universal TV bundle that includes Xena, Knight Rider, and Battlestar Galactica. If you want to jumpstart your collection, they do have a $50 bundle that has everything but the Universal three-pack, so $65 gets you current with everything available at the time of this review.
I really love what they did for this latest installment, especially with the visuals. No more pretentious beach house or basement game room littered with Star Wars collectibles; I am now reliving my college days in a vintage arcade that looks very much like the one I frequented at Purdue right down to the carpet pattern. The virtual arcade has all the amenities including a stereo that plays unlocked cassettes, access to the store to buy new tables, a prize wheel to spin for stuff you can use to customize the game, and even a functional dart board. And while I am usually the guy who plays just for high scores there is a pretty engaging Campaign mode that strings all the available tables together in a series of grindy challenges, some of which are downright evil, but you will do them because they are there, and that’s how you earn stars and prize wheel tickets.
Newly added for Quest 3 is the MR mode that replaces the virtual arcade with your own game room, allowing you to decorate with all your unlocked stuff as well as playing while still maintaining that link to reality. Admittedly, this comes off as a bit gimmicky after the first few times. Your primary focus is on the table while playing, so your surroundings are mostly irrelevant unless you are prone to VR sickness, in which case this will likely fix or ease those symptoms. I personally enjoyed the MR mode because I could set the pinball table up next to my TV and watch/listen to the news or whatever while playing, and how often do you get to tell Indiana Jones to stop blocking the view of the PGA Tour? Yes, all those fun animated characters and objects found in the game will now be in your game room.
All of the modes are back including classic, arcade mode with power-ups, and plenty of skill challenge options that are more luck than skill. There are also leaderboards so you can track your progress against the world. Whether you are here for pure pinball and the love of high scores or maybe just trying to unlock every single last collectible (and there are a lot of them) there is no end in sight to the enjoyment you are going to find in this new version of Pinball FX VR.
