When it comes to recreating the feeling of playing pinball in virtual reality, some key aspects are amiss.
A 2000s indie-pop playlist in the background, loud people running around the arcade or looming over your shoulder waiting for their turn, and your favorite table being out of service can’t be easily replicated. Pinball FX VR, however, gets pretty close to creating the de facto illusion.
Following up on the steps of previous entries — namely Star Wars Pinball VR and Pinball VR Classic, the latter also known as Pinball FX2 VR — developer Zen Studios is pushing immersion further by offering mixed reality, a new space to explore and decorate, and a plethora of tweaks and additions to licensed classics and original tables.
What is it?: Pinball tables in virtual reality inside an interactive space
Platforms: Meta Quest (reviewed on Quest 3)
Release Date: Out Today
Developer: Zen Studios
Price: $9.99 gets you access to the game and three tables; additional tables sold separately
When you boot up Pinball FX VR, you’re sent directly into an 80s-themed arcade, the environment that serves as the hub for the experience. After a brief tutorial, you’re free to move toward a table and immediately start playing. At launch, the game also offers a mission-based campaign to unlock cosmetic rewards, interactive gadgets and mini-games like a darts board, and the option to jump into mixed reality and turn the room of your choice into an arcade.
The base version of the game includes three tables: Curse of the Mummy, Sky Pirates: Treasure of the Clouds, and Pinball Noir. As the names imply, the themes are very distinct from each other, which is great, as it presents variety and the likelihood that you’ll end up with at least one favorite. They’re fairly beginner-friendly tables, and the aforementioned campaign adds specific tasks to pursue when playing them in case you prefer having some objectives to follow.
As is usually the case with Pinball FX games, there’s an array of customization options and different modes for each table. You’re given the option to invest time into learning the ins and outs of each one to compete with others in online leaderboards, if that’s your style, or just treat them more casually. There’s even the option of classic modes or a modern take that includes power ups.
You can customize certain objects on the tables, such as the bumpers or the ball itself. Unlike previous games, where the environment completely changed with a theme around the table, you now have specific objects and characters placed alongside it. They have specific animations, some extending over to the table itself. While not entirely intrusive, they can be distracting at times, but the game lets you turn them off.
Perhaps the biggest and most significant difference compared to previous games is the fact that you do have physical hands now. Sure, they’re translucent, but it means that you can place them at the sides of the table and play the game that way. It sounds like a small detail, but it helps with immersion greatly. You can even grab a quarter from your pocket, put it inside the machine, and then manually kickstart the game. It lacks a stronger presence of haptics to truly mimic the feel of the ball hitting bumpers and other objects inside a table, but it gets close.
While the improvements are noticeable from the get-go, there are some significant drawbacks. Starting with the visuals, the colors don’t really pop on screen, which is a must for these tables, considering how visually busy they are. There are lighting effects, sure, but they seem toned down, presumably to help maintain a steady performance, and the compromise takes some time to get used to. Especially if you’re coming from the flat version of Pinball FX.
Speaking of which, while the original Pinball FX lets you traverse and customize a fancy game room, the space is replaced by a rather dim arcade. It’s a fitting location all things considered, and you also have the option to place virtual memorabilia like trophies and statues in different spots if you like, or change the wall pattern with other designs, to suit it more to your liking. The main issue with the space is that it feels empty, almost eerily so.
While you can compete against other players with your scores in leaderboards, not having multiplayer feels like a missed opportunity. It seems like a technical limitation — whenever you interact with a table to start playing, the game first changes your instance, from free roaming the arcade to being in front of the table, so to speak, before being able to play. As tantalizing as the idea of seeing your friends playing in real-time is, it feels far off from happening in the game’s current iteration.
Mixed reality isn’t a solution to bridge that social element, but rather presents a gimmick that may or may not make a difference for you. After a quick scan of your room, you’re free to interact with a virtual door to a closet or open your palm to access the inventory. From there, you can place posters and statues around your home, as well as tables. If you actually have room to spare, placing multiple tables is a nice touch, but even so, it’s hard to achieve this without the option to rescale them. For some reason, the scale of the tables seemed to shift between mixed reality and virtual reality in a slightly off-putting way.
Comfort
Pinball FX VR is quite an amicable experience overall. You can turn smooth movement on or off to traverse the hub or teleport yourself by aiming with the right analog stick. There are options to adjust direction control, turn speed, tunneling intensity, turn amount, blink time, and disable teleport rotation.
You can opt to play seated or standing, and pick whether the game uses the height of you standing or the one if you’re sitting. Both can be adjusted by height, distance, and tilt. Other options include customization of the in-game experience, such as effects, haptics, and so on.
As for tables, Pinball FX VR is missing some of the biggest DLC tables at launch. This includes the Marvel collection, as well as some oddities that would have shaken out the current lineup and offered more variety, such as the pinball renditions of indie darlings like Crypt of the NecroDancer and Goat Simulator, as well as others like South Park and Borderlands: Vault Hunter. It’s nice to see Williams Pinball tables and be able to play them in the comfort of your home, but the selection could be bigger.
This also brings to attention a glaring issue that’s hard to ignore: Even if you’ve already purchased some of these tables in previous games, including Pinball FX, you’ll need to buy them again. If you’re already coming from Pinball FX2 or Pinball FX3, the whole process might sound irritating. If you already have a library built with your favorites, the additions of Pinball FX VR make it difficult to justify starting anew yet again. And while we didn’t consider it for this review, there is the option of getting a physical arcade cabinet to play with Pinball FX VR.
Pinball FX VR – Final Verdict
As pinball tables continue to be an increasingly rare hobby to access, games like Pinball FX VR do a good job of using virtual reality to try and bridge the gap. The experience is inherently cool, especially if you’re a pinball fan — yet, this is far from the first time, as Zen Studios has iterated on the idea for years across multiple platforms.
If you have enough room in your home, the addition of mixed reality is a solid gimmick, which pairs nicely with the inclusion of virtual hands overlayed over the controllers to best immerse yourself playing a table. Yet, considering that most other elements lack depth, like the campaign missions, or are purely decorative, like the trophies and gadgets to decorate your space, there aren’t many reasons to abandon your existing digital pinball libraries and start anew here by purchasing tables over again.
Who knows — a few years from now, there might be a pinball equivalent to Walkabout Mini Golf, allowing you to spend time with friends and fully recreate the joy of spending time with others at an arcade. For now, this is as close as it gets to mimicking the feeling of actually using a pinball table, although you might have heard this before.
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