Pinball is a game that usually presents you with a very specific set of rules, layouts, and goals and asks you to get to the highest score possible. Modern pinball games will then give you lives or a time to get yourself onto online leaderboards. Pinball Breeze tries out something different. The game presents you with partially built tables and lets the player place down parts of the furniture. The result is a game that has a playful customisation twist on a tried and tested formula.
There are 9 tables across 3 different environments to play. The casino area has snooker pockets, chips, cards, and a Sonic Casino vibe to it. Over at the beach, the pinball is replaced with a cannonball, and surfboards need smashing and tiki torches lit as the movement physics change up. Space is the most experimental environment, as instead of using traditional flippers, gravity switches are flipped to swing the ball around the galaxy to smash planets. Just make sure you don’t slingshot your ball out into the beyond. Each environment is so distinctive, it feels like three small pinball games combined.
After choosing a table, you’ll enter the placement phase. Tables will have a mix of flippers, bumpers, cannons, or gravity switches to place down and you’ll be able to place them anywhere that lights up green on the table. You can place them stupidly like I did, just to see what happens. Usually, it means your ball gets stuck, and if the shake mechanic doesn’t set you free, you can exit out and move things around again. Most tables have natural places you’ll want to place something, so it helps you reach the higher or edge parts of a table, but it really is up to you. The placement is simple and easy to do, and whilst I’d have loved to have had even more things to place (it is usually between 4-6 things per table), it works well.
When it comes to playing the game itself, Pinball Breeze has consistent physics. There isn’t flipper lag, and I’d largely get the same result every time I did the same thing. The space has wild physics, and so that is much more unpredictable, but I didn’t enjoy it any less. I also liked that each area felt and played differently. Each table comes with leaderboards for different modes, be that 1 ball, 1 minute, or 3 minute modes. The scores on the leaderboards have a vast difference between them at the top, showing just how skill and good placement combined can improve your score. Scoring is heavily tied to completing certain goals. These might be hitting every light, smashing every meteor or surfboard, or running every shoot. Pinball Breeze shows you how far along you are in completing these objectives, although sometimes I didn’t always understand what I was meant to be doing by the list alone.
It has been a while since we’ve enjoyed such a leftfield take on pinball. Going beyond a simply great table theme, Pinball Breeze’s attempts to make players the table builder in a safe environment are a fun way to test the waters for something deeper like this in the future. I’d welcome a sequel that goes deeper into the customisation features, making it part puzzle, part pinball sim. Pinball Breeze is a hidden gem and I hope it gets a wider audience.
Review copy provided by the developers. Pinball Breeze is out now on PC.
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