PinOut Guide

Pinball reinvented by the award-winning developers of Smash Hit and Does not Commute! Race against time in a continuous journey through this mysterious canyon of pulsating lights and throbbing retro wave beats. The classic pinball mechanic remodeled into a breathtaking arcade experience. PinOut! doesn't do a lot to your classic pinball formula beyond trying to make it more progression-focused. When you play the game, you can tap the sides of the screen to activate flippers to whack your pinball where you want it to go. Generally, where you want it to go in this case is up some ramp to another pinball table so you can get a higher score. If you ever fail to hit the ball and it falls between your flippers, you'll simply just move back to the previous table you were on instead of losing that ball. The pressure in PinOut! comes from a timer that is constantly ticking down. You can gather collectibles, hit power up stations, or activate mini-games to regain or save some time, but it's almost always never enough. As you progress through the game's different areas, you'll encounter all sorts of elements that will refine the experience while increasing the challenge. Early on, for example, you'll gain access to turrets that let you shoot the ball in a few directions but aiming the wrong way can often set you back, costing you precious seconds. You'll eventually run out of time, which will end your run and post your score. It's a truly one-of-a-kind game, that manages to encapsulate excellent visual design, a great soundtrack, smooth gameplay, and short bursts of fun perfectly suited to mobile. It can be a little tough to start with, but once you're in the zone, PinOut rewards your skill with new challenges to face and twists on its own gameplay that you won't predict. In short, it's an essential download. It's not pinball in the traditional sense it's something so much better.

PinOut handles much the same as any other pinball game. You have two flippers that you control by tapping on the left or right of the screen, and a small steel ball that you have to knock about the place. You can hold the flippers in place to control your shots and make them more precise, and you need to make sure your shots are precise to get where you're going. That, however, is where the similarities end. Instead of racking up high scores, PinOut instead tasks you with progressing through a series of maze-like boards as quickly as possible. You'll need to fire the ball into specific paths to send it further up the track, with multiple routes at each juncture to test your skill and tempt you into finding secrets. You can collect extra time from glowing white dots along certain paths, and when you reach a checkpoint your remaining time is saved, allowing you to return to that point in a new game with a huge advantage. There's also hidden power-ups to collect that can affect how time works, and minigames to play which give a further boost to your remaining time.PinOut is a little loose with its physics, working in your favour to slow the ball down when needed and push you beyond some areas should you need it. It can also be slightly unforgiving, especially when you're just starting out. You'll find yourself stuck on certain passages, hitting the ball wildly and praying for a miracle. But when you get into the flow, working your way from screen to screen like a pinball wizard, the game is majestic.

The graphics, including gorgeous particle effects, perfect a 3-dimensional view of the ever-growing table. The camera angles and perspectives look just right along the many inclines and declines of the tracks. The soundtrack, a bumping score of techy synth is pretty hot (and the devs know it since they made it available on multiple music stores). There are creative obstacles along the way and various points to collect additional seconds or powerups. The physics are quite smooth and the controls responsive though I did encounter some occasional latency issues and a blank white screen that I couldn’t escape for a few seconds. However, having played pinball in actual arcades, a few performance issues on screen could barely compare to actual dead bumpers and tight flippers.The basics are, as ever, to use flippers to hit a metal ball. But rather than straying into the drain (the space behind the flippers) costing you a ball, all you lose in PinOut! is time. Early on, armed with many dozens of seconds on the clock, this isn’t a problem. But when you’re several zones in, having battled your way through half of the game, seeing your ball trundle back several mini-tables is the kind of thing that could find your device being introduced to a wall at speed.

Fortunately, PinOut! is fairly generous in a number of ways, and clearly wants you to see as much of the game as possible. The physics appears simplified compared to many pinball games, making it somewhat easier to make shots, such as successfully catching a ramp that sends you to the next tiny table. Along the way, glowing dots can be collected to replenish your time. There are power-ups to collect as well, providing anything from trippy slow-down effects to a twitchy aiming mechanism that lets you redirect the ball when it’s already been blatted by a flipper. In fact, you could say the same about the entire game. PinOut! looks and sounds superb, is one of the very few pinball titles that works as well on a tiny smartphone as a tablet, and regularly shakes things up across its eight zones, forcing you to adapt or die. Only the fact that this is a single, fixed journey knocks replay value. In the short term, though, this is a hugely compelling mobile ball-smacker that deserves to be played by many, many people.

There are currently two forms of measurement in the game the height you achieve and the seconds you accrue. The height you achieve appears to be the number that defines your skill in the game as a type of high score. However, I would love to see points as a third type of metric because both height and time can decrease. Points earned for great shots or multiple moves repeated in a row or even hitting targets that are specifically for points would always increase and add something else to go after.Pinball is a solo game so it maps well to a mobile experience. However it is also an incredibly tactile game, and PinOut gets so much right about the pinball experience that I do find myself missing haptic feedback. Sound and particle effects do help with the feedback, but if Mediocre could add vibrations or something physical, PinOut would be the mobile pinball game to end all pinball games. PinOut takes this idea and recreates it faithfully, and lets you trigger video mode far more frequently than real tables ever did. There are four minigames in total, and each turns your score into added seconds on the clock. So in PinOut's own traffic dodging minigame, for example, each car you pass adds a second to your timer. These moments might not trigger a sense of nostalgia for those who grew up in the years after pinball's reign in the arcades, but for those who remember those days fondly, it will be hard to hold back a smile the first time one of these pops up. There are creative obstacles along the way and various points to collect additional seconds or powerups. The physics are quite smooth and the controls responsive though I did encounter some occasional latency issues and a blank white screen that I couldn’t escape for a few seconds.

The really unfortunate thing about PinOut! is that the game doesn't seem to behave like an actual pinball machine. This is to say that the physics of the game ball and the flippers don't behave in a way that most pinball machines do, which can be frustrating and confusing. I understand that PinOut! is going for something other than your typical pinball experience, but if you're using pinball as your foundation, your game needs to feel like pinball. PinOut! also has a curiously deceptive free-to-play model in that it implies that players–whether they pay or not–can start new games from the table they got to in their last run, even though this is not true. If a free player tries to choose the option to continue from their last table, they get to watch their ball tumble down to the first table before being given control again. That whole experience just feels needlessly deceptive and kind of cruel. The levels itself doesn’t only change in their color palette but also change in design and mechanisms. A change in design will keep it refreshing to figure out the best move and angle to aim the ball to the different tracks. It will get fairly more complex in the higher levels. A change in mechanisms will give the track more wonderment and surprises. For example, one of the levels will have machines that will hold and shoot the ball to a further distance but with two options to choose from. Further on, there are also tracks where the path is incredibly drawn out for each move to count with extra time but has to be followed almost exactly, eventually there are also levels that drop fake balls to confuse and create collision, to hinder progress. Overall, PinOut is a great game. It is completely free with the option for an in-game purchase that activates checkpoints. However, the game is completely doable without this purchase. Plus, if you can get to level 10 and further in one go, the sense of achievement will make it worth every minute. With a fun and energetic soundtrack, dynamic and creative courses and an added time challenge, PinOut is well worth your time and remains fun many times over.