Haunted Mansion: Ball Blast

It's amazing how adaptable pinball would appear to be. Not only are you likely to find scores of real life tables adapted to resemble everything from football fields to full scale alien invasions, but now their mobile equivalents are starting to branch out too.

Disney's Haunted Mansion: Ball Blast is probably the first to link a game of pinball to the spirit world.

The advantage it has is that, unlike real tables, Haunted Mansion's targets can move, with apparitions disappearing from the screen altogether only to pop up in an entirely new location later on.

That's essentially Ball Blast's challenge, the idea being to move from table to table (some are linked) coping with obstacles that are there one minute and gone the next, picking up enough purple orbs along the way to expel any ghosts from your path.

The tables themselves are lavishly decorated, and it's not exaggerating the effect of their design to suggest that there's a real sense of ghouls and goblins within. On a practical level, however, there's very little joy to be found in play.

The very fact that both obstacles and goals shift position almost at random makes targeting your ball (the '4' and '6' keys control the corresponding flippers) especially tricky, and success is more a case of luck than direction, the gauge you need to fill with orbs gradually draining itself as time passes.

More than a few frustrating minutes can be spent cannoning off obtrusive architecture as you aim to move forward, the bar filling up only to drip away while your ball pings around pointlessly.

What's more, these pinball levels are sandwiched by a series of tedious and hard to control Marble Madness style stages, the aim of which is to guide your ball around simplistic mazes, picking up keys to open up doors along the way.

Using the number keys to slowly drive your ball one way or another, movement is incredibly stiff and these stages are neither fun nor tricky to play, their only benefit being the welcome relief they provide from the tables themselves.

When that's a level's biggest selling point, you know the package as a whole is lacking. Though lavish in terms of looks, Haunted Mansion: Ball Blast is tame rather than terrifying, with a series of stale bonus levels tagged on for good measure.

With progress relying far too much on luck, Disney's latest trip to the Haunted Mansion is, sadly, far from a scream.