Pinball Big Splash

Genre: Pinball

Players: 1

Game Company Bad Behavior Profile Page: Max Interactive Studio

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Review:

Pinball Big Splash is a cartoony, family-friendly, sealife-themed Pinball game released as part of an asset on the Unity Asset Store in 2020, Pinball Creator. You can clearly see this board as one of the ones included with the game here, and all that has been done to change it is that additional visual elements have been added before this game was released on the Nintendo Switch in 2021.

To the developer’s credit, the additional visual elements here are pretty decent, with the various fish brought in to adorn this game being well-animated and quite active. In particular, the shark’s way of excitedly opening its mouth in hopes of chomping the ball, and it slumping down disappointedly when this doesn’t happen, are both highlights here. Overall, this game isn’t super-impressive visually, but it looks nice enough.

These visuals are backed by a lighthearted soundtrack that works well enough, but it is constantly drowned out by the cacophony of dumb voices and cartoony sound effects the various characters on the board spew out as you hit them, with the end result being an annoying and unrelenting bedlam that refuses to shut up until you stop playing.

The gameplay here is competent for a pinball game, but not great. Unfortunately, the nice visuals hide much of the table from view and make it difficult to track the action. Also, the lines here aren’t intuitive, and the progression is not self-evident. What’s worse, the physics seem inconsistent, and at times they do things that don’t make sense to me. I found myself constantly frustrated with how little effect my flippers had on the ball in the walled-off area next to the shark, which made it impossible for me to do anything worthwhile when the ball got there – and apparently this was an important part of the table’s progression, or at least it seemed to be.

For the price of $3, Pinball Big Splash isn’t a horrible game of pinball, but it is far from a great one. There are numerous design issues that keep the board from being as fun as it could be, and while the animated visual elements here are nice, they obscure the gameplay, making things a tad worse. If you’re a pinball-lover who finds this game’s theme appealing, you may find the game to be worthwhile, but anyone else just looking for a decent pinball game may want to hold out for something better.

tl;dr – Pinball Big Splash is a family-friendly sealife-themed Pinball game. This is a decent table with some good animation, but unfortunately the decoration obscured the table and there are some other issues that make this table less fun than it could be. It’s not a horrible Pinball game, but you have better options.

Grade: C-

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2021 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Worst Asset Flip

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