Zombie Pinball Reviews

Note: This review will seem very similar to my review for Babylon 2055 and Quantic pinball games. This is because the "developer" of both games just [b]copy and pasted the entire game.[/b] Asset flipping begins at home, I guess. Zombie Pinball is an extraordinarily mediocre pinball simulator game... I won't go into explaining what pinball is, but it's important to know there's quite a few pinball games on Steam, and while I don't agree with their predatory pricing models, a few of them give you completely free tables to play on and are backed by a really solid pinball simulator engine. This one is the opposite. You can unlock a handful of tables, but there's no point... this is worse than the 3D spaceman pinball you get with Windows XP. It's only in 2D, there's no table bumping feature (I guess you don't have to worry about Tilt???)... it's just a simplistic mess that I am surprised isn't a Flash game. And a slew of technical shortcomings. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. The game features simple, fairly basic 2D visuals, and while some effort went into them, and they don't look bad exactly, they don't look great, either. In the 3D era of gaming, that kicked off in the mid 1990's with dedicated 3D GPUs like the S3 Virge and ATI Rage, phoning in the graphics like this isn't going to win any awards or appeal to enthusiast PC gamers. The very poor quality of this game puts it squarely on-par with ancient 1990's Flash/Java games, and given it's 2024 (and this was released not so far back in 2017), gamers and the industry expect and deserve better than this kind of low effort shovelware. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. You don't have to take my word about how bad the game is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. Zombie Pinball has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is "Veritable Pirate", hitting the pirate thing on the table score thing, trivial to achieve, but less than 8 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch. Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a modest spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, and isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 8 percent of players bothered playing the game for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this game to have so many concurrent players who didn't bother engaging with this game? Trading cards. People will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game. That tells us people only really bought this game for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with little merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 110,000+ games on Steam? Zombie Pinball has the farcical price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. This is also competing with over 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.