Review: Zen Pinball – Deadpool Table

Deadpool was always going to be a wise choice for a pinball table, offering a load and very verbal accompaniment to the usual bings and bongs of your average pinball experience. With a bright and bold table containing some great missions to complete and tricky challenges to try out. There’s also the slightly trippy concept of the table being inside another table, inside another table, and so on, but it’s only something you’ll see between balls.

The general pinball experience itself is as spot on as you’ll have already found if you’ve ever played a Zen pinball table before now, so it’s the table itself we need to focus on, and it’s generally a very fun addition to your collection.

It’s immediately obvious that the Deadpool table will be talking to you a lot, enough to put you off the first few times you play it. There’s loads of one-liners, plenty of jokes and comments about the table or what you’re doing on it, and even a couple of comments about Zen themselves. But a few games later and that’ll just become part of the soundtrack which roars away in the background while you focus on pinging your balls around the place.

A handy table guide outlines each of the missions the table offers, each of which can (if you’re skilful enough) be completed in three different difficulties. Missions themselves are entirely possible to complete, but will take some pretty epic concentration and luck if you’re going to get through each chapter before the final ball drops.

Deadpool_001

One unusual, but very cool feature is the Blind mode, whereby almost all of the lights on the table turn off except the flippers, ball and a couple of other lanes on the table. It gives a very different challenge to the usual offerings, and the near-impossibility of building a solid score with the lights off is a fair trade-off for playing such a cool looking part of the game. You’ll also find Deadpool himself getting a bit bored, so will entertain himself by throwing smoke grenades onto the table, dropping ramps into new places and even destroying your ball all together. Rude, but good fun.

Bearing in mind how cheap these tables are to buy, it’s a pretty safe bet to say that anyone who has anything close to a passing interest in Deadpool, enjoys a pretty wild and loud pinball table or just wants to add to their collection will do very well to pick this one up. The challenges will keep you busy, and there’s always the fun of competing with your friends’ scores if you have other pinballers on your friends list. It can get a little irritating when Deadpool just doesn’t shut up, but that’s the nature of Deadpool and if you’re used to his inane ramblings from other areas then you’ll probably barely notice.

Zen have delivered yet another table worth ploughing hours into; whether your table collection sits at 1 or 41, this is definitely worth adding to the pile. There’s also the usual bonus of buying it once and having it on the PS4, PS3 and Vita (with the latter offering the brilliant portrait orientation too) so you can carry a bit of Deadpool with you wherever you are, even if it’s just to annoy everyone on the rush hour train home.

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