Makers of fine digital recreations of real pinball tables
FarSight Studios have teamed up with Stern Pinball, the real world makers of
many of those real pinball tables, for the stand alone release of Stern Pinball
Arcade, a sister title to the extremely great The Pinball Arcade already
available on Xbox One and other platforms.
Stern Pinball Arcade features quite a few tables already available in
The Pinball Arcade, which makes the $40 price tag a little tough to swallow,
but the new exclusive tables introduced here are pretty fantastic. Value is always going to be subjective,
though, so we won’t go too far into that, and instead can happily report that
the pinball gameplay itself in Stern Pinball Arcade is as sharp and as close to
perfecting the real thing as ever. See
all of the details here in our full Stern Pinball Arcade review.Game Details
- Publisher: FarSight Studios
- Developer: FarSight Studios
- ESRB Rating: “T” for Teen
- Genre: Pinball
- Pros: Awesome gameplay; perfect recreations of the tables; good selection of tables
- Cons: Expensive; missing some features from The Pinball Arcade
- MSRP: $40 for disc, tables can also be purchased a la carte
Read our review of The Pinball Arcade
Stern Pinball Arcade is available both as a $40 retail game that includes all ten currently available tables, but also as a “free” digital platform similar to how The Pinball Arcade works. You can download the Stern Pinball Arcade for free, and it comes with the Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein table, but you’ll have to buy the other tables separately. The tables are available either individually or in bundles and you get by far the best cost-per-table-ratio buying bundles of tables or, better yet, getting the physical disc for $40 (or less on sale). Hardcore pinball fans might not need or want to buy all of the tables here, though, as we’ll detail below (spoilers: you probably already have some of them).
Stern Pinball Arcade is available both as a $40 retail game that includes all ten currently available tables, but also as a “free” digital platform similar to how The Pinball Arcade works. You can download the Stern Pinball Arcade for free, and it comes with the Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein table, but you’ll have to buy the other tables separately. The tables are available either individually or in bundles and you get by far the best cost-per-table-ratio buying bundles of tables or, better yet, getting the physical disc for $40 (or less on sale). Hardcore pinball fans might not need or want to buy all of the tables here, though, as we’ll detail below (spoilers: you probably already have some of them).
Value is sort of a relative term because $40 for 10 tables
is a far cry from the 13 tables for $30 offered in Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams
Collection back in 2009 or the huge array of tables available in The Pinball
Arcade, but you also have to consider that the tables featured in Stern Pinball
Arcade cost a lot more to produce. Many
of the tables in Stern Pinball Arcade are more modern and, thus, more
complicated to emulate. Likewise, most
of them also carry mainstream licenses which make them much more
expensive. This is a trend that we have
started seeing in season 4 and 5 of The Pinball Arcade that is simply
continuing here. FarSight Studios have
pretty much exhausted the cheap and easy tables so the days of being able to
buy a dozen tables for a song are pretty much over and we need to adjust our
expectations accordingly.
As mentioned above, a surprisingly large chunk of the tables
on offer here are also in The Pinball Arcade.
Of the ten tables currently available, seven of them are also in The
Pinball Arcade (and, no, tables you buy in one game don’t cross over to the
other, they’re separate). Those tables
are Ripley’s Believe it or Not, Phantom of the Opera, Harley Davidson Third
Edition, Starship Troopers, Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, Last Action Hero, and
High Roller Casino. If you already own
them in The Pinball Arcade then the Stern Pinball Arcade isn’t nearly as interesting. Since it is a stand-alone release it does
come with its own set of achievements for these games and a fresh 1000 points
of GamerScore, though, which might be enough to entice some players to double
dip.
Or you can, of course, save some cash and only buy the
handful of brand new tables. The three
new tables are very interesting and represent some of the most ambitious
and innovative pinball tables ever made.
Star Trek (based on the J.J. Abrams movies) is from 2013, AC/DC is from
2012, and Mustang is from 2014 and all are brand new to the Pinball Arcade franchise and
incredibly high tech with licensed music tracks, multiple game modes, and
complex scoring and mission systems that really push the boundaries of
pinball. Stern Pinball Arcade will also
be getting its own line of DLC tables as well with a Ghostbusters table already
lined up with more to come down the road.
There are a couple of other slight differences between The
Pinball Arcade and Stern Pinball Arcade as well. Stern Pinball Arcade presents all of the tables in a sort of 3D
arcade with all sorts or artwork for the machines and tchotchkies on the walls
and it looks very cool. The load times
are a little longer in Stern Pinball Arcade, though, and it is missing the
options to change the room lighting and select different colored balls. Being able to change the lighting in
particular is very helpful for certain tables in The Pinball Arcade, so not
having that option here is a bit disappointing.
The core pinball gameplay itself in Stern Pinball Arcade is
exactly what we’ve come to expect from FarSight Studios. The tables are perfect digital recreations
of the real tables with impeccable ball physics and they’re even running the
same ROM code as the real tables to ensure everything plays just like the real
world versions. The tables play great,
the physics feel right, and all ten tables are an absolute blast to play. When you realize that pinball isn’t simply
about randomly hitting the ball to survive and that there are actual missions
to complete and high level play requires a decent amount of skill, suddenly
things become a lot more interesting and addictive and awesome and Stern
Pinball Arcade delivers those feelings in spades.
I think it is important to remember that Stern Pinball
Arcade isn’t just the sum of its current parts and is actually a new platform
that will improve as new tables are added in the future. We certainly wish there was more new stuff
here, but as a way to lay the foundation for the future Stern tables to be
added later it is solid. Pinball
die-hards likely will already have most of the tables here, but in that case
you can only buy the new ones and skip the ones you already own and look
forward to the new tables coming later as DLC.
If you’re a Pinball Arcade newbie and haven’t already played these
tables, on the other hand, Stern Pinball Arcade is a pretty good way to get
your feet wet and well worth a look.
