If Pinball FX is supposed to be the definitive way to play these tables, I'd prefer to have development time spent on giving players access to all the options. Maybe I'm not hip to the demands of the market, but I don't see the value in cosmetic items, especially if I'm paying full price for tables. It had me wondering why the Pinball Pass (or at least a version of it) wasn't part of Game Pass. Again, that does not even include all of the tables. As for the pass itself, one month costs the equivalent of $15, while a year works out to $100. Aside from the Pinball Pass, the only use for coins are cosmetics for your virtual game room. You can buy Zen's in-game currency (Pinball Coins) and then use those to purchase the Pinball Pass, but you can't use the coins to buy tables. There is no guarantee that the table you want to buy is available individually. Select tables can be as costly as $15 each, while others are only available in bundles. Without cross-buy, the table pricing can be a hard sell. In April of last year, Zen's COO told Polygon that another reason for not migrating prior purchases was that Zen wanted to take control of entitlements, so tables would be cross-buy. Prior to Pinball FX's debut, Zen announced that policy was changing with Pinball FX, in part because of the work required to rebuild everything in Unreal Engine. It's also a perfect example of how Zen doesn't seem to know how to monetize Pinball FX and is just throwing things at the wall.įor the previous games, Zen had a policy that if you bought a table once, you wouldn't have to re-buy it for a future engine release. The Pinball Pass is a way to try most (not all) of the tables without purchasing them individually. That one just required an extra button press to get out of, but it made the game appear temporarily broken. Another odd bug was the introduction of an invisible selection between My Tables and the Tournament option in the menu. I just had to fumble my way to completion (killing the game and restarting didn't fix the issue). I couldn't cancel and didn't have prompts telling me what to do. In a later game, I ended up having the collectibles tutorial randomly restart when I tabbed through the collectibles option, but it was in a partial state. The first time I ran through the tutorial, I never got the one-day promo Pinball Pass. In addition to the UI navigation issues, I also ran into random bugs. I would like some friendly competition with my online friends, though. I'll never hit the top of the leaderboards, so I don't really care about random players. I love pinball, but I'm merely an OK player. Other UI quirks include an inability to save display settings (you have to apply the owned filter to the table display every time you start the game if you want to select from your tables), and there's no option to default to friend settings for the leaderboards. The free events work with trial tables (essentially giving you a chance to play full games on select tables that you don't own), but there is no direct indication of this if you don't happen to have those trial tables installed. For example, in the events section, there are events that require paid tables and events that are free. There are also elements that aren't clear. There is no consistent design language used for the UI, which means your first attempts to navigate are likely going to involve wondering why the cursor isn't going where you want it to go. I hopped back over to the Xbox Series X, and it was back to lower scores and unreliable shots.Īnother bit of frustration comes down to the UI. On the PC, every pinball table I tried was playable. I downloaded the game there to compare, and it was a night and day difference. Oddly, the Steam version of Pinball FX doesn't seem to be affected by the lag issue - at least not to the same extent as the console. On Pinball FX3, where it has the same pro settings, I was reliably hitting intended shots. Fish Tales (one of the freebie tables) is an easily reproducible test. Swap between Pinball FX3 and Pinball FX on the same table, and it's like night and day. In a vacuum, you may just think you suck or have poor reflexes. The game has added warnings to use game mode on your TV, but even on a fully optimized setup, noticeable input lag is still present. To be fair, it has improved since launch, but it hasn't been eliminated. The biggest, and most persistent issue, with Pinball FX is the input lag.
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