Welcome to our review of the Stern Pinball Arcade game on Switch!
Not so long ago, I also reviewed that other pinball game on Switch, now followed by the one that is available as a physical cartridge.
What sets this game apart from the Pinball FX3 game, is that the tables in this game were actually based on real-life pinball tables and not just created digitally. It adds to the retro feel and does give you that old feeling of physically playing these. FX3 did also sport some features like loops that would probably not work in real life. Stern is all about old skool pinball galore.
As this game is free to start on Nintendo Switch, I would recommend picking it up immediately as the free table you get, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is one of the best in the pack in my humble opinion and it might persuade you to pick up more tables that are for sale. Personally, I am a collector of physical games and as a pinball lover, I picked up this game on release day here in Europe.
The one thing that really intrigued me, this game does not allow me to take screenshots, which I do regret as I always like to show off screengrabs from my actual gameplay, a nice feature the Switch offers. On the other hand, it gave me a whopping 16 gold points for registering the game. So I guess that is still all fine.
So what is great about this game? The feeling of pure nostalgia when playing, I actually played the Ghostbusters table in real life in the past and the experience is close to the original, with one extra feature, the ability to “unblock” a ball when it is stuck rather than forcing the tilt function to unblock a ball.
The gameplay itself was as to be expected from Stern products, while it is no real pinball table, it does act and feel like the real deal! What I did find a bit disappointing, the menus were so simplistic, it felt like they were made 10 years ago. A bit of a shame that such a nice game was sporting such antique menus.
Loading times were a little on the long side, but it never really bothered me much. There are many classics like the AC/DC, Ripley’s believe it or not, Star Trek and Ghostbusters in this game. It is a guarantee for some real pinball action if you enjoy these kinda games!
In conclusion, this game has a free table and really should be checked out. The realism compared to the Pinball FX3 game is quite remarkable and the tables really play well. I would recommend downloading the free demo to give this game a spin.
Somehow I feel this game might be a little expensive if you buy all tables separately, so do chose for that physical option if you love this kind of games!
My rating is a multiball away from a perfect score at 90%
