This week I find myself reviewing something a little different to the usual fare I’m given. Compared to the console or PC game titles I mostly find myself considering, Wild West Pinball presents a different task entirely. While I’m still following the standard play-game-write-about-it format, mobile apps come with their own unique set of contexts and require something of a shift of critical perspective.

For example, while still a game, mobile apps are traditionally less of a lengthy or involved experience. Hardware and control restrictions account for much of this; let’s face it, you ain’t going to get GTAV packed onto a tablet device and nor would you really want to.
That’s the thing; the games are designed for a specific purpose most of the time; coming under the much-maligned ‘casual game’ moniker. Marketed ostensibly for short, sporadic bouts of gaming in while waiting for various aspects of real life to begin and end, mobile games are usually designed to fill a very specific niche; time killer. Most mobile games are aimed firmly and squarely for this market, with a few notable exceptions such as Baldur’s Gate, Knights Of The Old Republic & Xcom: Enemy Within.

With this perspective firmly in place I can easily say Wild West pinball is worth a look. It’s basically a fairly faithful and engaging depiction of a pinball table and whether you like it depends pretty much entirely on whether you like pinball. A boring and rather uninspired statement perhaps, but no less true for it, mainly due to its robust build standards.
The physics and mechanics work pretty much as you’d expect. It basically feels like playing a pinball table. The controls are simple, with the main aspect; flicking the flippers, being achieved by tapping the left or right hand side of the screen with your thumb while holding the device; a bit like you’d hold a real pinball machine. It’s very intuitive. The ball moves as you instinctively feel it should do, angling off the flippers as intended, being propelled from buffers with realistic force and momentum and colliding with obstacles as you would expect. In my playthrough I experienced not one clipping issue, crash or graphical glitch at all. You know how some games just feel a bit ‘off’, some slight unrealistic aspect of the whole not being obviously wrong but nagging at the back of your mind while you play? Well there’s none of that here. I honestly forgot I was playing on a tablet. You can’t say much better than that on the accuracy stakes.

From a table perspective, the game itself is solid if not spectacular. The theme is fine and all of the features work well within it. Strategy is allowed through a button in the top left that you hit with your ball to allocate a mission, which lights up a particular light pointing out somewhere else to shoot your pinball. If you do, you get points. Other sections are opened up by hitting a set of buttons and one particular part involving shooting your ball at an appearing figure in a pseudo shootout is quite nice. Compared to many pinball tables I’ve experienced there the table overall feels a bit limited and low in features, but for short stint gaming it works fine.

As a free app there are, as you’d expect adverts, but these are very infrequent and don’t appear during play, only occasionally in the front menu. In a few hours play I think I experienced them perhaps 3 times, which is good. There are, of course, micro-transactions available, allowing you to purchase extra balls and whatnot, but these are fully optional and not shoved in your face. Indeed, they are in no way necessary for the game, pretty much as they should be in my opinion.
All in all, Wild West Pinball is a time sync; designed to kill a few minutes here or there, be it on the bus, on a work break or a comfort break and it does the job admirably.
While the game is in no way innovative, new or especially exciting, it’s not meant to be and doesn’t need to be. It’s a fun little game that has surprisingly high build standards for what I expected. Going in, I expected a fairly adequate pinball game; what I got was an extremely competent pinball simulation.

Perhaps the biggest compliment I can give the game is that it will be remaining on my tablet now I’ve finished the review for me to return to when I have minutes to kill here or there; and that pretty much unprecedented.

If you want to give it a go, here is the IOS link: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id310158471

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