Brave Pinball (PC)

 

 Okay, I'll start this review with an apology: there's no screenshots other than the title screen because every time I took a screenshot in-game, the game would pause, and the screenshot would just show the pause menu. Every time, no matter what I did. After over an hour of trying different solutions, I gave up. So unfortunately, you'll have to deal with an unillustrated review, just this once.

I bought Brave Pinball a few weeks ago, as I was browsing the summer sale on DLSite, and the concept of an RPG-themed pinball game seemed pretty cute and fun. I especially like the little synergy between the main character and the concept of pinball: his swords are kind of shaped like pinball flippers, and the flippers in the game are kind of shaped like swords. Also, there isn't actually a ball in the game, as you're instead chucking a tiny version of the main character around the table to hit things with his swords.

The over-arching goal of the game, alongside the traditional pinball goal of scoring points, is to collect sixteen "pieces" of something. What the something is is a surprise. Pieces are collected in various ways: random drops from enemies in each area, reaching score thresholds, beating bosses, and so on. So, to get them all, you have to be able to explore the massive table and all its sub-tables, as well as just scoring points. Luckily, you don't have to get every piece in a single game, it's more of a long-term goal.

There's one massive flaw to the game, though, that really hampered my enjoyment of it: there's no way of nudging the ball/knight a little in the right direction. In a normal pinball game, this would be frustrating enough, as it'd cause you to lose balls down the middle with no hope of saving them far too often, but, as previously mentioned, Brave Pinball has an exploration element to it. So what this means is that you can struggle your way up the table a few areas, and in a second or two, find yourself all the way back down to the starting area. There's also little technical problems that a nudge action would have solved, like how the knight often gets stuck on objects for long, boring seconds at a time, or stuck in a loop bouncing between certain objects and the side of the table.

That's not the only flaw the game has, though. If you think back to my review of Dragon Beat: Legend of Pinball, you'll remember that (in my opinion, at least) an important part of pinball is that you should have constant stimulation: ideally, every time you hit the ball up the table, and every time it hits something, there should be a noise, a flashing light, some points scored, or all of the above. In Brave Pinball, not only do the enemies only score points when they're killed, rater than every time they take damage, but there are also these wooden windmill/waterwheel things littered around the board that just get in the way, scoring no points and often proving another hurdle in the way of the game's exploration gimmick.

I admit I do feel a litle guilty giving such a damning review to a modern indie game, the developers of which obviously put a lot of love into, but I just can't recommend Brave Pinball. It's addictive, as most pinball games are, especially on PC when you can load them up and play a quick game to pass a few minutes, but unfortunately, the flaws are just insumountible. I do hope, though, that the devs go back to the drawing board and give it another try sometime, as the basic idea of an RPG-themed pinball game is really cool.

Other Stuff Monthly #16

 Back in early 2018, I backed a game on Kickstarter called Crypt. It was a fun little dice game about a bunch of scheming princes and princess who want the king's treasure, despite all being left out of his will. When the same people had another campaign in mid-2019 to fund their next game, Afternova, I naturally backed that one, too. Unfortunately, my copy arrived literally the day the Covid-19 lockdown started in the UK, so it sat unplayed on a shelf for a few months. But now I've had a couple of games of it, and it definitely lives up to its predecessor!

 

The game sees the players recruiting various space-faring engineers, to mine planets for different coloured minerals, which in turn are used to build spaceship parts. Some of the spaceship parts add new abilities, like more storage space to store minerals, or getting to draw extra cards at certain times,  while others are just worth victory points at the end of the game. 

 

The real hook of the game is that it can be difficult to recruit  all the engineers you need to mine the planet you want, so you can negotiate with other players, agreeing how to divvy up the planet's yield in exchange for the use of their engineers. So you have to balance out getting the minerals you need, while trying to keep your opponentsaway from all the ones they need. It obviously gets harder to negotiate towards the end of the game, as the game ends when one player finishes six spaceship parts, leaving everyone else one last turn to do score what they can.

 

Playtime is about half an hour, and it goes by pretty quickly. The whole game is a combination of negotiation and resource management (not just the literal resources of the negineers and minerals, but also the space needed to keep them, as you can only hold eight cards and four minerals at a time), and there's very little reliance on luck, so winning or losing does depend on who was the better player that game.

 

I've enjoyed every game I've played so far of Afternova, and it's pretty cheap as far as decent board games go, so I definitely recommend picking it up, as long as you have at least two other people with whom to play it. It's also got a ton of silly animal puns on the engineer cards, which is a nice bonus!