Hidden in the depths of the PS5 store is a relatively unknown game called Ping Pong Peg. I bought it as curiosity got the better of me and it looked like a game inspired by Peggle and Pachinko. What Ping Pong Peg does is merge Peggle and Arkanoid or Breakout by allowing you to bat your ball bearing up and down the screen to clear the pegs. There is a great idea here but the game design tries to bury it in the first few hours of play, making it a jarring and difficult experience to recommend.
Each of the 50 levels contains a set of pegs that you are tasked with hitting and removing from the playing area. You have the tiniest ball bearing that is barely visible on purpose to shoot out of a canon and initially the ball will bounce around the pegs working its way down to the bottom of the screen. Unlike Peggle though, Ping Pong Peg has breakout paddles on the top and bottom of the screen that you can move and angle to bat the ball the other way. When you do this, gravity reverses, meaning your ball will now fall upwards. This continues until you lose all your balls or clear all the pegs. You won’t be clearing all the pegs for the first few hours due to how this game is designed though.
Each level has three stars to collect – two being score related and the third asking you to clear all the pegs. Stars mean points that you can spend on upgrading your equipment. You see the paddles you start off with are fragile, slow and small. They will explode after a single hit and move slower than your ball. This means you’ll be aiming for a single star most of the time and spending your points to try and make the game more playable. Part of the problem is also just how small your ball is and you can’t actually see what’s going on part of the time. Guess what, you can spend points making the ball more visible. That feels like a terrible gameplay decision and it bleeds through into chaotic and confusing gameplay – especially when sometimes the ball physics means for no reason the ball will magically shoot at the speed of light across the screen. It feels like Ping Pong Peg is designed to annoy you and tire you out early in the game and it makes a terrible first impression. Part of this is also down to some unintuitive controls that require you to move and tilt paddles using different analogue sticks and directions that don’t align with the movements of your paddles either.
I really struggled with Ping Pong Peg until I hit around level 30 of 50, constantly scoring one or maybe two stars per level if I was lucky. Then suddenly, the game comes alive. This is down to bosses that appear every 10 levels (they don’t attack you, they just move around a lot) that when defeated offer up some really valuable power ups to buy. One gives multiball, one makes the ball glow green and be larger on the screen so you can actually see what the hell is going on and the other cruicial one allows you to flip gravity of your own accord. The gravity flip is a game changer because about 10-15 pegs per level automatically flip gravity when you hit them and since you couldn’t see the ball, the game felt too random and uncontrollable for its own good. With the ability to flip gravity (and a future upgrade lets you do it more often than once per ball), it places so much more nuance and control back to the player that I started to enjoy Ping Pong Peg. I felt like I was playing the game, not the game playing me.
Sadly, for many, this will come about 3 hours too late. The early game is so maddening and frustrating that I expect many will just give up. The trophy percentages certain suggest this. I really don’t think its a good design decision to make the game feel so poor early on to then make the player feel much more powerful later on in such an extreme way. There aren’t many Peggle-likes out there but all of them are far more accessible – especially the superb Roundguard, which absolutely runs rings around this. I can only recommend this if you’ve played the likes of Roundguard and Peglin and still want more peg action. There are some nice idea here and the mash up of Peggle and Breakout is a superb one, it just needed to be much more playable to succeed.
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