Hands on with Mile High Pinball for N-Gage

The new N-Gage games are coming thick and fast, with the latest being Mile High Pinball, a revamped version of the sky-high pinball game released for the original N-Gage in its dying days.

Does it deserve a second chance? I grabbed the trial version yesterday afternoon and had a play, and first impressions are pretty good.

As before, the idea is to play pinball on a series of tables (45 in this case, although they're called 'boards') that are stacked on top of one another. So, each screen sees you unlocking the barrier at the top, which when accomplished lets you zing your ball up and onto the next board.

There are three ways to play. You can get to grips with the controls in a Practice Game, or play a Ranked Game which keeps your score to upload to the N-Gage Arena community. Meanwhile, Play Duel mode makes it possible to compete head-to-head against other N-Gage users over the network.

The basic gameplay is pretty simple, with you pressing '1' and '3' to batter your left and right flippers on each screen, and using '5' to trigger power-ups.

I haven't yet got deep enough in to explore all of these, but already there are power-ups to boost your score, do more damage to enemies, create cloned extra balls and so on. It adds a Breakout element to proceedings.

The game looks and sounds good, and already in the first few levels there's some decent variety in terms of the challenges to unlock the next board. The ability to buy power-ups as well as gain them through gameplay is novel, while the way you unlock (or buy) different balls adds a nifty collecting element.

But it's the Play Duel mode I'm particularly looking forward to. There are two ways to play it – Score or Altitude – and both see you competing for three, five, ten or 15 minutes against other gamers, using the same platform as System Rush to find people to play against.

Score mode is great fun. You see your opponent's score mounting onscreen, although you don't see their ball. Your victories and defeats are then tracked on the N-Gage Arena community. This could be the thing that keeps you playing for weeks, beyond the single-player mode.

So, it's a promising start. Click 'Track It!' if you agree and you'll get an alert when we publish our full review.