There are so many feelings to unpack here. This game has triggered me into hating Dave & Buster’s all over again. I miss actual arcade games. I miss the 80s and 90s D&B. I’m old.
That’s about all the unpacking I need to do.
Anyway! The Coin Game from developer devotid and publisher Kwalee has brought back all these bitter feelings about Ye Olden Days. Back in my day, we had actual arcade games, such as Paperboy, TRON, and Punch Out! Nowadays, those arcade titles have been replaced by coin-driven ticket grabbers that play off the gambling genetics of an easily addicted society. Of course, if I were running a business driving these things, getting people hooked on dropping $10-50 at a time to win that $2.00 toy would probably be an unethically lucrative strategy.
BUT! Those old arcade days are gone, sans a place called Crabtowne USA in Maryland. The ticket games are in, and they are perfectly captured, addictive, and all, within devotid’s The Coin Game. While this game appears nothing more than a glorified and professional version of something that you might find on Roblox, it is nonetheless entertaining with its execution and how well-defined the physics are in the ticket-grabbing games it is toting within its gameplay experience.
Let’s get into it.
The Coin Game comes in a few flavors: Birthday, Survival, and Quick Play modes. The latter of the bunch is just what you would expect from the gameplay, quickly playing. Kind of a time waster in a sense. Anyway, the former two are actually very different modes that add some pizzazz and player agency to the ticket arcade adventure.
Starting with Survival, this mode allows players to live their arcade life on a rather large island. The mode starts with the player waking up in their room and trying to figure out how to get from one place to another without breaking the bank. Survival mode poses a challenge of keeping money in the player’s character’s pockets, making sure the arcade experiences are finite because of that reason, while at the same time opening the island for exploration that expands the world of The Coin Game significantly. If players need a quick comparison of this mode with an old familiar, then look no further than adventuring within a Roblox game (pick one), as this mode would be it. The world is big, filled with tasks that help keep the player’s budget and life afloat, and allows players to come and go as they please.
While the island is unremarkably blocky and goofy, which appears to be the intention, it can build out the world for players and give the gameplay experience some fantastic scope and range. Because of the moving and pieces and parts of the gameplay in Survival mode, it seems far more satisfying to play, even though the struggle the developers throw at players to keep the experience going is hard and fast from the get-go. For example, within the first 30 minutes of Survival, I found myself trying to figure out how to travel around the island. I bumped into a bus stop, then had to purchase a bus pass that was only good for one trip. After getting on the bus and then mistakenly getting off the bus at the wrong stop, I found myself stranded because I didn’t have extra money to get another pass. And, thus, survival began.
Now, I could gripe and moan about the game’s difficulty right out of the gate because of the above description, but the developers clearly warned me with the name SURVIVAL. While this mode offers more than just juggling money and getting places, the majority of what players will want to do is get money and get places. In a way, this mode works just as advertised, as it does present a challenge and requires player effort to solve problems like gaining money and getting places. It works as advertised, but is it fun? Well, if players are looking for a complicated, problem-solving set of challenges, then this is right up their alley. But, if the 0-90 mph difficulty isn’t expected, then this might frustrate players and get them to jettison this mode. It all depends on player expectations and patience. For my money, I think it’s a good challenge, but it wouldn’t be the first mode I would jump into when I load The Coin Game up on the PlayStation. And that brings me to the next mode – Birthday mode!
As the name suggests, this mode is a bit more direct with its intentions and features a lot more fun without the fuss of survival. With Birthday mode, players can experience a bevy of arcade games on the island, jump from place to place quickly, and just sit back and enjoy the ticket arcade ride. This mode starts players in an arcade, gives them a ton of money, and allows them to play as long as they want and as much as they would like within arcades. In easy terms, this is called ‘Free mode’, as it will have players worrying about the games rather than how much money they have in their pockets.
Speaking of those games, one of the more impressive designs of The Coin Game is the number of ticket games it features and how accurate the physics are with them. Players will have the chance to experience ticket arcade gaming favorites such as Skee-ball, that weird The Price is Right spinning wheel, and even the coin-drop game that rules the roost for most Dave & Buster’s arcades. There are a heckuva lot more games than those three, but that is just to name a few. How they look and work will be immediately familiar to gamers, as the physics in most of the games included emulate the real-world ticket arcade gaming experiences. Dropping coins to push coins down a slot works just like you would find the coin drop game in a D&B. The physics are real! Players will also get their addictive fix from these games and forget that they aren’t real. It’s easy to see how much effort and time were put into the ticket arcade game design for The Coin Game, and it was time well spent, as they are accurately replicated for the gameplay to work well.
Of course, just because there are some varying modes to experience and fantastic games to enjoy, this doesn’t mean all is well with The Coin Game.
My first big gripe is the lack of HCI with the gaming user interface. While I must admit that most of the games are easy to figure out, there were a few that I had never seen before in any arcade. Or at least, ones that I accidentally avoided. Because of this lack of familiarity, sometimes trying to understand how a game works meant a lot of trial and error. For example, during the coin drop game, I hit a bonus game, and it opened a matching game that was within the coin game. This requested that I turn over cards and match three to gain their bonus buff. It took me about 10 minutes to figure out that my left thumbstick controlled a mouse icon that rolled over the cards, while the X button allowed me to choose it. I was idiotically moving the right thumbstick, which was doing nothing but controlling the coin drop mechanism hidden behind this card matching screen. In addition, I must have accidentally backed out of the coin drop game and had to go back into it, which required me to pay for more coins. Anyway, this created confusion and frustration, and had me completely visually missing the tiny mouse icon that was sitting on the table of cards. Once I figured it out, the game was a bit easier, but that 10 minutes of confusion and frustration without much of a tutorial, or intuitive HCI-action, had me steaming a bit while throwing my hands in the air. Having a bit more directness to the experience and putting details of how a machine works, or at least making controls a bit more obvious, including with sub-games, would have gone a long way to make understanding things a lot easier. There are a few games that do this within The Coin Game, but most of the time, I was doing just fine from my own muscle memory.
Anyway, it wasn’t a huge gripe, but it was a gripe.
As for the other gripe, I think that the graphics were a bit uninspired. While keeping things simple and concentrating on gameplay is always a wise move, this did visually feel like a Roblox game. The graphics are low-end PlayStation 2, with very rigid textures that featured a lack of detail. Is the gameplay affected by this? Probably not, but it’s noticeable. I am not asking the developers to create a PlayStation 5, Unreal Engine-driven experience with the graphical design, but a bit more details would have been nice.
On that note, let’s wrap up this review.
Conclusion
The Coin Game from developer devotid and publisher Kwalee is a fun game, especially if you love those ticket arcade gaming experiences. The games are methodically created, fun, and addictive. The two main modes, Survival and Birthday, are just different enough to enjoy a variety of gameplay experiences depending on one’s mood. The game does have its faults, but it has more good than not.
