iPhone Review: Wild West Pinball

Developer/Publisher: Gameprom
Genre: Pinball Sim
Price: $1.99
Verdict: Ideal Pinball sim for enthusiasts
Pros: Provides an authentic pinball experience on your iPhone/iPod Touch
Cons: Won’t convert people to Pinball, maybe a little too bare

Whether you’ll enjoy Wild West Pinball is very easily summed up. Do you love Pinball? If so, then buy it. If you’re not so bothered about the old arcade game, well this isn’t for you. Wild West Pinball is most notably a Pinball sim first, a game second. I don’t mean this in a derogatory fashion, just don’t expect any flashiness. It provides a very authentic experience for the pinball enthusiast but perhaps lacks a certain something for the gamer.

The game is extremely simple to get into. Load the game up and instead of a menu screen you go straight into the action. Extremely intuitive to get into, it’s a simple matter of tapping on the right side of the screen to control the right bumper, and of course the left side controls the left bumper. There are no options that need customising, no other tables to try. Just a Wild West themed pinball table, which is pretty much all that you need for an authentic experience, but I suspect that many, myself included, would have liked to have seen a few more options available; just a front end would have felt a bit more game-like and less sparse.

However, Wild West Pinball does admittedly do the job perfectly despite the barren options and lack of menus. The moving camera angle follows the ball admirably, it never faltered with the developer’s statement of 40 frames-per-second graphics being correct by the looks of things. The sound effects are mostly appropriate (although I did have to turn the volume up a fair bit to hear them) and the physics appear to be flawless. I’d have liked to have seen a more complex table with more details on it, but other than that, Wild West is good fun, and ideal for any pinball fan.