Pinball Legends Review

A Clever Premise

Pinball Legends is a block-breaking RPG published by Exptional Global. Don’t let the name fool you, it’s technically not pinball. However, getting balls to bounce off monsters (blocks) to clear the stage is exactly what you’ll be tasked with. The premise of Pinball Legends is clever. It is essentially influenced by games like Peggle Consequently, Pinball Legends is almost not a casual game because of the RPG elements.

You are transported into another world where you need to save your friend. You embark on a journey, fighting monsters, gaining skills and experiencing a rouge-like story. Naturally, puzzle games like Pinball Legends don’t truly need an in-depth story, but the effort is much appreciated.

All the Skills

Pinball Legends is simple, each stage has 25 rounds. Each round, you destroy block-like monsters by bouncing projectiles off said monsters repeatedly. Each turn, your character moves to a different place on the bottom of the stage, and monsters will move up one tile. These terrible creatures are trying to get to you, thus inflicting damage if they do.

 Pinball Legends does pay homage to pinball in how each stage is shaped. As well as trying to get a ball to bounce off various objects, that is where the similarities end. The most interesting part of Pinball Legends is after a set amount of rounds, you get to pick between three different skills. Skills are where the game shines; from combo bombs to generating lighting skills give your projectiles more power. With the rouge-like nature of starting over each stage, you will want to collect all the skills Pinball Legends has to offer.

As you progress through Pinball Legends, you gain gold, diamonds and chips. These are used to upgrade your character, giving both passive and powerful abilities that stack on top of your skills. For example, an initial bomb chip equipped to your character will make your projectiles have a bomb effect on the first impact.

While upgrading your circuit board, you boost the damage projectiles inflict, upgrade your health or upgrade the chances on a critical hit. All skills and abilities stack on one another, consequently making you overpowered in this block-breaking RPG. Despite the awesome combos that I managed to pull off, I felt that various skills were overpowered, thus making the game too easy.

Circuit Overload

The biggest issue is most evident in the endless mode; I pulled off some wonderful combos taking advantage of how skills stack. Unfortunately, in the later stages, combos of 600 caused the game to crash multiple times. This is a huge problem and shows how fragile the system is with having some skill combinations too powerful.

Despite the major flaws in this free-to-play game, it is still a fun experience. If you like playing casual puzzle games, this is for you. If you play a lot of RPGs and like to exploit systems for fun. You are sure to give Pinball Legends a circuit overload.