Pinball FX3 has scored another pinball hit with Indiana Jones: The Pinball Adventure. While it isn’t perfect, it still brings a good pinball experience to the Pinball FX3 family.
I love me some Pinball FX3. If you have never dabbled in Pinball FX3, it’s essentially a program that carries a slew of pinball emulators. The pinball machines in its collection are a variety of new creative and classic pinball machines that are hard or impossible to find. Every few months (probably more than that recently) the good folks at Zen Studios unleash new pinball machines for people to try out. The machines are well emulated and nearly always perfectly recreate a pinball machine experience. It certainly is cheaper than owning the actual machines, maybe not as cool but this route saves space. Anyway, this month, they have released Indiana Jones: The Pinball Adventure, which is a combination of all three movies in one single pinball machine.
Is it good? It certainly has a lot of Indiana Jones personality, but also a few frustrations.
Let’s get right into it.
Pinball Delight with a tad bit of delay
Finding a good and challenging pinball game that keeps motivating its player to keep going after they fail is a tough nut to crack when you’re developing a pinball experience. I have played quite a few pinball games, including about six machines this morning while playing Indiana Jones on Twitch (1:50-16:00), and have always enjoyed the rewards for my labors when trying to navigate the gorgeous pinball machine designs. Typically, most pinball machines will give you some grief, give you a lot of rewards, and give you a play that is super long and gratifying. Then end your game. It’s a ramp-up with a reward at the end, but also plenty of motivation to jump back into it.
When Indiana Jones: The Pinball Adventure was on, it was a helluva experience. There were neat traps you could hit your ball into on the pinball board, it had a bottom emulated LED screen at the bottom that would change with the films, it also had some clever and well-positioned hittable objects and bumpers just to keep the action flowing. There were a few times where I got on a large roll and just kept going in the game, which made me forget that this was a chore of a review (it wasn’t a chore). I believe the highest score I had was somewhere in the 200+ million range because everything flowed well when the game hit its stride. When the game was rolling, it was a beautiful experience that felt like an old pinball game of yesteryear.
Now, sometimes in all that fun, the game will throw you in a snake pit.
Indiana Jones: The Pinball Adventure creates good motivation to keep playing, as a pinball machine should, but it also certainly lets you know how easy it can take all the fun out of the experience with a few well-placed balls (as you can see in the video above). There were multiple times (and I revisited the game at the end of that two-hour stream to make sure I wasn’t crazy) where just putting the ball into play meant it went straight down without a paddle even touching it. Out of all the games I played this morning on Twitch, I failed the most at this one and sometimes by no fault of my own. Don’t get me wrong, I suck at games at times (see anything from FromSoftware for details), but there were moments where this pinball machine wouldn’t even let me touch the ball before it spilled into oblivion. It was a bit frustrating, thus the reason why I took the break to go play other games and circle back to Indy in the stream.
In addition to this, I think one of the more jarring problems I found with this game was a slight delay in button-pushing and paddle reaction. It just seemed off by a quarter of a second. It was weird because that delay didn’t occur in the other pinball experiences I played during the morning, but it was quite prevalent and consistent with Indiana Jones: The Pinball Adventure. It was super duper odd. Now, I did adjust to the delay with my button pushing to get the most out of the experience. I had been trained in the art of button timing thanks to my Sega Dreamcast experience with NFL 2K online (just a two-second delay between button and reaction), so it wasn’t difficult to adjust. I just wish it wasn’t there.
Regardless of the above comments, the game is still darn fun. It really makes you want to go watch Indiana Jones and it does a superb job of spreading the movies out and using them correctly with the pinball experience. It’s not quite Phantom Menace good, but it’s good enough to get a fun experience out of it.
Outside of difficulty and small delay, it still was a fun game when it got rolling at times.
Visual delight
All delay and well-aimed balls to the gutter aside, the replica of the Indiana Jones machine was positively stunning. The music mixed with the images, and with the 3D models that moved to-and-fro around the gameplay area, sold the Indiana Jones theme quite well. I like what this machine looked like, the soundbites that it played to reinforce the three movies (thank God that fourth one wasn’t around during 1993), and the John Williams MIDI soundtrack backing up the action. It all worked with the visuals and made the game a bit more fun. It was just a gorgeous game to watch in motion and one of my favorite pinball experiences because of these elements.
Conclusion
Pinball FX3 has scored another pinball hit with Indiana Jones: The Pinball Adventure. While it isn’t perfect, it still brings a good pinball experience to the Pinball FX3 family.
