Hyperspace Pinball Review – It’s not an explosion of epic awesomeness

Our rating:

By: GamieON

Version #: 1.1

Date Released: 2011-09-01

Developer: GamieON

Price: 1.29

User Rating:

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Hyperspace Pinball is a new arcade type pinball game produced by GAMiEON Inc and available for both iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. The developers describe this game as a combination of “the skill-demanding challenge of pinball with the excitement of an arcade shooter wrapped up in an explosion of epic awesomeness!” That sounds pretty great, and it puts a very exciting image in your mind. The good thing is that for the most part, the app does deliver a relatively entertaining experience, but an explosion of epic awesomeness might be going a bit far.

The game starts off with the screen taking you through a 3D interface that is reminiscent of Tron. It has some great graphics, and certainly gets you primed to start enjoying a classic arcade game like pinball. When you start the game, you get to choose Easy, Normal, Hard or Endurance. It seems that the levels and the difficulty do not change regardless of what you choose, but you do have fewer lives to work with when you choose harder difficulties. The game then starts and it looks like a very, very basic pinball machine. The screen has the standard two bumpers near your flippers at the bottom, and two flippers at the top corners as well. The majority of the screen is empty space in the middle, until the game starts, and that space fills with many floating geometric shapes.

The goal of the game is to use the pinball to destroy those pieces, and as you reach a certain score, a “portal” will open allowing you into the next level. While definitely entertaining for a period of time, the idea of hitting many floating shapes over and over again got boring pretty fast. They do a nice job of throwing in some decent “bosses” that you hit every three or four levels, but the story itself just isn’t there. In the app description, it talks about traveling through space and beating all the levels by killing the aliens with your spaceship. It all sounds very exciting, but nothing within the app actually tells you any kind of story whatsoever. Even if it was a basic intro, or some short pop up phrases that give the bosses or your mission any character or person, it would definitely improve the playability of the game.

Another thing that was a bit off-putting was the fact that this is a pinball game. For most people, classic pinball involves a pinball machine that has a ton of different things going on (all relevant to the story), and so much is usually going on that it takes a little while of playing to understand the different mechanisms. This game has almost no functions or features that are similar to pinball aside from those four very small bumpers, and the fact that you are hitting a ball with the same style flippers. If you go in expecting classic pinball, you’ll find that this new type of arcade game is pretty far from that experience.

All and all, it’s definitely a pretty good game if you go into it not expecting classic pinball. If the levels changed a bit more to include more obstacles and puzzles instead of just very similar floating geometric shapes, then it would be more enjoyable. The physics and graphics of the game are great, and it has many different levels which gives the game some depth. The problem is that after a short awhile, you don’t really see the point to continuing to play this game. The points are pretty arbitrary (which is classic pinball), but you don’t really reach any landmarks or story markers that make you feel like you’re not just doing the same thing over and over again. The most exciting part is when you have a multi-ball situation, or potentially a double multi-ball, then things start feeling a bit more like pinball in that you can’t track all the balls and things are quite hectic. A good game for one dollar, but hopefully they make a few more adjustments, change the level structure a bit, and give it a story that you can follow!