Digital Extremes Frags Pinball

Adventure Pinball: Forgotten Island

When the Unreal engine isn't busy running countless fragfests, capture the flag games, or uninspired FPS fodder it's busy running...pinball? Yep, the power of the Unreal engine has been harnessed and altered to bring you the latest in ultra-realistic, high-speed, first-person...pinball.

Neverminding the fact that using the Unreal engine on a pinball game is something akin to bringing a BFG to a Duck Hunt (yes, I do realize I have a problem mixing my game metaphors, thank you), Adventure Pinball: Forgotten Island turns out to be a pretty cool, if wacky version of the game.

Gameplay/Control:

Forgotten Island doesn't exactly follow the same mold as- every other pinball game on earth. It actually tried to include a "Story Mode"- you know, the adventure part of the title. Without getting too far into the inane details of the plot, your father's discovered a Forgotten Island ripe with cavemen, dinosaurs, and volcanoes. You play through different boards, which are different parts of the island trying to help the villagers. OK, maybe I did just get into the details.

What's fun about the story aspect is the almost seamless way the story and the game of pinball were joined. Digital Extremes creatively integrated the board into the landscape of the islands. You never feel like you are looking at a pinball board, instead the game presents you with a section of the island, albeit a creatively landscaped one, that doubles as your board. With the exception of the flippers, multiplier lights and a few ramps there isn't much in the way that looks like it doesn't belong there.

This actually makes the game much more intuitive than most pinball games out there. At the start of the board the game actually bothers to go over what your objective is. In Story Mode your goal is to simply help the villagers or save yourself and get out. What you must do on the board to accomplish this is illustrated very clearly before you play your first ball- of course, they let you skip these instructions if it's not your first time around.

What makes it more fun is that the objective isn't always something simple like knocking down drop targets to enable a jackpot. In the first stage the game requires you to knock out the sharks that keep a villager stranded on a smaller island and get her on a raft to safety. Another stage has you hit certain ramps to bang a gong that opens up a secret exit. For pinball purists this style of play may not be welcome, but for those who occasionally like to play a little pinball, and not necessarily for super high scores, this is much more entertaining.

The most obvious departure that Forgotten Island takes, though, is the pseudo-first person approach. The Unreal engine allows the game to use different view angles than the standard hover over the flippers point of view. Instead, Adventure Pinball closely follows the actual pinball during play. The benefit of this approach is that you can see exactly what's going on at all times- it definitely makes bumping the table much easier when you can see where the ball is. Unfortunately, there are many times where the camera doesn't get you back to a view where you can see your flippers quickly enough. During fast play it's easy to lose track of where your ball is headed and end up watching it fly past your flippers before you know what's going on. This problem is easily overcome with experience and board familiarity, but it takes away from some of the fun and makes it less intuitive than it could've been. A problem that you can't overcome, however, is some of the physics quirks the game displays.

While the ball seems to interact fine with everything else on the board, it's the flipper interaction that ends up having the problem. For some reason, the flippers only have any real effect on the ball when the ball reaches the very end of the flipper. The ball should definitely have more force exerted upon it at this point, but getting the ball away from the flippers by hitting it before that point is almost always useless. This makes some shots impossible to perform. The result is that for some tasks you need to just hit the ball full force in a different direction then creatively bump the table to get the ball bounced to where you wanted it. While all boards have multiple sets of flippers no boards have multiple sets of flippers they are usually located in completely different areas of the boards that are only accessible by special events. Even more annoying is the very rare moments where the ball passes through the flippers.

For the most part these problems don't surface too often, and the game can usually be enjoyed without having to worry about them. But because they are such an important part of the game it definitely keeps Adventure Pinball from delivering a completely fun experience every time. However, the unique gameplay does make up for the problems.

Graphics:

Using the Unreal engine, Adventure Pinball doesn't have the super glossy look of most other pinball games. However, the fully 3D aspect of the game doesn't call for it. If there are any complaints with the 3D it would be that some of the objects are a little blocky. But it's a small sacrifice for what the engine gives back.

Boards carry off a sort of grandeur as the camera sweeps over it showing erupting volcanoes, waterfalls, caves and clever ramp designs. Different textures, while not the sharpest around, do well at differentiating areas even within boards. The ball receives special treatment as it's mapped with a super glossy surface. The shine and reflections aren't real-time but looks nice. Even cooler are the different ball-effects. For example, throwing your ball into a volcano gives you a lava ball. This yields some nice effects as lava particles and flame trails are left behind. Throwing a lava ball into water douses it off, but putting a regular ball into water gives you a water ball with an appropriate liquid texture.

This isn't a stunner, but it's more than you'd expect from a pinball game.

Sound:

While the music is appropriately a mix of creepy and mysterious mellow tunes, the sound effects get a little distracting.

Game event audio cues are done by the typical annoying announcer guy. Such memorable quotes as "Let's do it!" and "Oh no!" are sure to cause you to turn it down a little. Since the whole caveman theme is going on we also have the needed "Ooga" here and there- though I must admit to kind of liking this one in a Warcraft kind of way.

The rest of the audio is nice though, crystal shattering sounds, water and volcano sound effects come out pretty nicely and keep the theme going.

Overall:

Adventure Pinball: Forgotten Island may have a few quirks, but really came out to be a fun and original break from the standard pinball formula. With 9 boards to play on and even a free downloadable stage off the website it's definitely worth being your next pinball game.