The Bottom Line
Pros
- Looks great.
- Plays well.
- Low price.
Cons
- No instructions.
Description
- ESRB rated E - published by SCEA
- Graphics: Nice, slick visuals that match 'Uncharted.' Good detail for a small screen.
- Sound: The usual pinball dings and bongs and bouncing metal ball effects coupled with music from 'Uncharted.' Cool.
- Gameplay: It's pinball, so it's simple to play, and hard to master, which makes for a nice challenge.
- Multiplayer: There's no multiplayer, but there are online leaderboards so you can see how good you are.
- Replay Value: High if you're a pinball fan. Unless you're a pinball wizard and finish everything on the first go.
- Recommendation: As cheap as a PSP Mini, but more polished. Try it even if you think you won't like pinball.
Guide Review - 'Pinball Heroes: Uncharted' Review (PSP)
Pinball Heroes is a PSN-downloadable game with your choice of pinball tables featuring graphics and sounds from other hit games. You can choose one table, or you can buy them all. I only played the Uncharted table, so I've restricted my review to that one, though I suspect that much of what I write will be applicable to all of them.
The four tables available for Pinball Heroes as of this writing are:
- High Velocity Bowling
- Hot Shots Golf
- PAIN
- Uncharted
Game Details
- Publisher: Sony
- ESRB Rating: E (Everyone - Comic Mischief)
- Genre: Arcade
- Release Date: November 12, 2009
- Format: download only
I should mention that I'm not much of a pinball player, though I do occasionally get hooked and work on a table for a few weeks. So, consequently, I'm not very good at pinball--either the real thing, or computerized versions. If you're a big pinball fan, you might want to keep that in mind as you read this.
I was pleasantly surprised by how well Uncharted translated into pinball. I wouldn't have thought that an action-adventure game would easy to convert into a game that's solely about keeping a metal ball bouncing around inside a clear-topped table. But pinball isn't just about keeping that ball going. It's also about aim: you have to hit certain targets at the right time in the right order to complete specific objectives.
In Pinball Heroes: Uncharted, those objectives are named after different aspects of the original Uncharted game and obstacles, bumpers, and other objects are appropriately styled. One tunnel, for example, looks like the crashed airplane from Uncharted, and some of the bumpers are designed like stone ruins from the South American jungle. While the mechanics are pretty much the same as other pinball games, the Uncharted theme gives this one a fun look.
My only real criticism is that there weren't any instructions (or at least none that I could find). That's really not a big deal for a pinball game, where the only control you have is shooting the ball at the beginning and moving the left and right flippers. I discovered by accident that it's possible to switch from the default zoomed-in view that moves with the ball to the zoomed-out view that shows the whole table. And it was only after I'd played several hours that I discovered that it's also possible to rotate the full-table view to portrait mode. The other thing I wondered about was tilt. In an old freebie PC pinball game I used to play, you could tilt the table if you were desperate (but tilt it too much and you'd get a penalty). I tried pressing all the buttons, but there didn't seem to be a tilt control in Pinball Heroes. A simple screen of controls would have answered my question immediately.
