Pinball Wizard was the first game I tried on Apple Arcade, Apple’s new subscription-based mobile games platform. It feels like I hit the jackpot. Even with all the other games available, apart from What the Golf? (review coming soon!), I haven’t played any other games. I’m still waiting to get tired of Pinball Wizard.
What caught my attention was the game’s simplistic visual design. I’m sure there’s an artistic term for it but I’m a bit lacking in my art-class vocabulary. Take a glance at the screenshots and you’ll see what I mean — it’s a visual style I’ve been seeing more and more of lately (Untitled Goose Game, The Stillness of the Wind, Donut Country), especially within the indie game scene. I find the design style appealing in its simplicity. It’s a needed break from detail-rich games like Mordhau or Red Dead Redemption 2.
I expected to toy around with Pinball Wizard for a night or two before erasing it from my phone and shifting my attention to another mobile game to distract me for the next night or two — continuing what’s become a bit of a ritual with how I digest mobile games.
Instead of quickly shuffling through Pinball Wizard like a fast-food order, I found myself regularly looking forward to playing the game in my free time. I’ve been consistently sneaking it into my smallest chunks of free time that I’m normally spending scrolling through Twitter or Reddit.
Pinball Wizard makes Apple Arcade worth the cost of admission.
As a dungeon crawler experience crafted around the concept of pinball, players tap the left and right sides of the screen (held in landscape mode) to control paddles to bounce a sphere-shaped wizard (not witch!) through floors of a tower. Each floor is filled with enemies, one of which holds the key needed to unlock the door leading to the next floor.
Bounce the wizard around using the pinball-like paddles and try to bump her into the enemies to damage them. Once the key-holding monster is slain (it’s a randomly selected monster each time the level is played), the player can either wait for the game to automatically shift to the next level or they can attempt to make a difficult shot that puts the wizard right through a narrow doorway that leads to the staircase to the next floor. If the player makes the doorway shot, they’re rewarded by the wizard fully regaining her health for the start of the next floor.
Of course, the enemies will not just let you bump them to death without putting up a fight. Each enemy has different attacks and weaknesses that can be exploited to handle stages as efficiently as possible. The wizard also has some special attacks of her own that she can utilize in addition to the straightforward bump attack.
Aside from enemies, each level contains barrels that, when hit, can refill the wizard’s health and energy. Bumping into a health barrel replenishes a bit of health and energy barrels do the same for the wizard’s energy level. Energy is used to wield magical abilities that allow the wizard to shoot energy orbs at enemies or super-slow time and reverse trajectory at a moment’s notice.
Activating abilities takes a little bit of muscle-memory training because the buttons appear on the screen just above where players are tapping to trigger the paddles. Without physical buttons to alert your thumbs they’re about to hit the wrong button, it is easy to activate the slow-time ability when you meant to trigger the right-side paddle.
Additional frustrations come with the level designs themselves. Because some the levels are so compact, I found it was annoyingly easy to be thrown out of play by hitting an immobile or explosive object, even if they were in a centralized spot and not near an edge. Additionally, as is a regular danger of pinball, there’s the chance that the wizard passes clean between both paddles, with either paddle having a chance to misdirect the fateful plunge.
Fortunately, falling off the floor isn’t an instant defeat. The wizard takes a large chunk of damage for the fall, but if there is any remaining health left she will run right back up the little staircase and return to the current level, ready to get back to business.
Completing floors and collecting the treasure that monsters and treasure barrels drop reward players with gold they can use to augment the wizard’s attributes. Additionally, experience points are collected from killing monsters and progressing through a floor, per run. With enough experience points, the wizard will level up and get a modest stat boost as well as the chance to unlock new abilities to spend gold enhancing.
For example, once I leveled up enough to unlock the ability that reduced fall damage, I spent as much gold as I could on that ability. The cost of each ability upgrade increases with each expenditure, so the more you enhance an ability the more it’s going to cost you.
That light RPG mechanic helps each run — even the ones that end embarrassingly quickly — feel valuable since I’m still collecting a little bit of gold or experience even in defeat.
A mobile game that values my time? The world needs more games like The Pinball Wizard. This game is an easy recommendation for anyone with an iOS device who is interested in trying out Apple Arcade. The necessity of needing to be an Apple Arcade subscriber is the only drawback for The Pinball Wizard, as you’ll need an active subscription to be able to access the game. Other than that snag, The Pinball Wizard is an excellent experience.
Epic Brew maintains its own subscription to Apple Arcade.
