Game Reviews

The Walking Dead Pinball

Star onStar onStar onStar offStar off
Get
The Walking Dead Pinball

The zombie horde is closing in on Lee's rag tag group of survivors. The group is made up of, enemies, close friends, and - most painfully of all - his surrogate daughter Clementine.

If only you'd been quicker with your flipper finger, and had managed to score that multi-ball bonus, you would have at least pushed your highscore past that of your buddy's.

Wait, what?

Flipping hell

The Walking Dead Pinball is a weird one. Sure, Zen Studios has made virtual pinball games that tie in with big franchises before.

But never for a dark, weighty, multiple choice adventure game. Which is a spinoff of a TV show. Which is a spinoff of a comic book.

Where was I? Oh yes. The Walking Dead Pinball. It plays a decent game of flippers and bumpers, but it's difficult to understand who it's for.

Bumper crop

As we've come to expect from Zen Studios, the core pinball action here is extremely solid. The ball moves convincingly and at a fair old lick, and the feel of the flippers (one attributed to either side of the screen) is surprisingly weighty.

But the big thing here is the whole Walking Dead angle. Given this unlikely property to work with, Zen has stayed admirably and surprisingly faithful to the source material.

At various points your on-table success will enable you to make choices, whether that's flipping between the four scenarios of the original game, or choosing which course to take in each scenario.

All this really accomplishes is a change in the sound bytes playing in the background, or a change in the lighting and bonus goals for the table. But it's a neat nod nonetheless.

Cameo parts

Occasionally, you'll even get a minor re-enactment with the 3D models of Lee and Clementine.

There's also a shooting gallery bonus mini-game stashed away in here, though the controls are pretty dodgy.

While this faithfulness is admirable, you have to question the point of it all. Do fans of the original game really want to live through this moving story again in piecemeal fashion through the medium of a pinball table? Maybe. But we can't see why.

For pinball fans, meanwhile, the references will be at best entirely wasted and worst bafflingly off-putting. They only get one table, too, with no possibility of downloading more as in Marvel Pinball.

The Walking Dead Pinball is an odd creation, then. It's fan service where none was required, and a decent pinball game that's occasionally hampered by its theme.

The Walking Dead Pinball

An odd mixture of solid pinball and grim multi-choice adventure that probably won't fully satisfy fans of either
Score
Jon Mundy
Jon Mundy
Jon is a consummate expert in adventure, action, and sports games. Which is just as well, as in real life he's timid, lazy, and unfit. It's amazing how these things even themselves out.