Adventure Land (Pinball FX Table Review)

Special Note: Originally all Pinball FX tables were going to be posted to a single review guide, but there would have been loading issues. I’m splitting the guide into individual table posts.

Adventure Land
First Released December 12, 2017
Main Platform: Pinball FX
Switch Platform: Pinball FX 3
Designed by Tamas “Ypok” Pokrocz
Set: Zen Original Collection 1 ($15.99)
Links: Strategy Guide – Pinball FX Wiki

It’s a beautiful, zany-looking table, but the grinding combined with the hungry outlanes makes this significantly less fun than I think the average player would be primed for on looks alone.

Angela is beside herself that my father and I ranked Adventure Land GOOD and claims our love of theme parks and their artificial reality is what distracts us from a table that flows badly. When she found out Jordi was giving it a GREAT, we had to fetch her fainting couch. Maybe she has a point, and in fairness to her outrage, this is as generic as an amusement park gets in media. I get why people would dislike Adventure Land. It features some stunning scoring imbalance issues and absolutely maddening slingshots and outlanes. Fine. She’s right in that regard, and I’ll throw in that Adventure Land has the absolute worst skillshot in all of Pinball FX. It’s above the right slingshot at a horrendous, high-risk angle that doesn’t seem compatible with the physics. The only time we’ve made it on Pinball FX 4 is via a lucky bounce. Making it opens the super skillshot, where you can light an extra ball, and it’s actually not even worth trying for that. The rest of the table is a massive grind, because that’s Zen’s thing. Adventure Land is the definitive burst-scoring table thanks to some of the most slow-to-active modes in Pinball FX.

Persistent Problem – Mini-Game Rules: Mini-Games in pinball should be simple enough to be self-explanatory, but when that’s not the case, it drags the whole table down. Take the Icarus V here. It’s a minigame where you have to make a Ring of Fire-like ride do loops. And these are the instructions for the mini-game in their entirety: “Once the ball is inside the toy, press the flippers at the right time to make a loop.” That’s about as useless as giving a dog a tuba. What flippers? Both? Alternating? When’s the right time? There’s a bunch of lights. Which light is the one that signals “the right time?” Say what you will about Pinball Arcade and its hundreds of pages of painfully detailed instructions, but at least every question was answered. For Pinball FX, you have to track down what the actual object is on websites or the strategy guide. They need to hire someone to do better instructions. It’s arguable the worst overall aspect of Pinball FX and Pinball M are the instructions themselves. This is why we tend to prize intuitive tables and mini-games above all else. If they insist on complicating these things, practice mode isn’t enough because you still have to grind to get the shot, and then if you fail it in five seconds (like we used to do with Icarus V), you have to start the grind all over. They could fix this by allowing players to practice the more abstract mini-games separately.

Here’s the thing: Adventure Land’s layout is really good. Most of the shots are fun in a vacuum. The reason why I’m settling on GOOD instead of a higher score is Adventure Land’s good shots are rendered meandering thanks to the grind. The table is too big, the shots too spread out, and the time limits are too strict (even with shots that extend the timer) for Adventure Land’s own good. This is one of those pins that’s BEGGING to be saved with a ROM update that cuts the grind and shot requirements. Maybe all of that wouldn’t be a problem, but Adventure Land wants to be both a grind-a-thon AND a brutally punishing table with serial killer outlanes and slingshots. It takes too long for this table to feel rewarding. Too repetitive. Too back-loaded. I like shooting on Adventure Land, but when it takes forever for those shots to pay off, it’s a downer. It’s a slog. And, for a lot of players, it’s a big turn-off. I’m also not a huge fan of the mini-games that act as a buffer because, on a table that shoots this tough, they make it harder to get into a rhythm. Adventure Land is one of those pins that’s showing its age a lot sooner than a lot of much older Zen originals. There’s a chance in another two to three years, I’ll be dropping my rating to BAD as well.
Cathy: GOOD (3 out of 5)
Angela: BAD (2 out of 5)
Oscar: GOOD
Jordi: GREAT (4 out of 5)
Dash: GOOD
Sasha: BAD
Elias: BAD (Pinball FX3 on Nintendo Switch)
Overall Scoring Average: 2.71* – GOOD
Primary Scoring Average: 2.83 – GOOD
*Nintendo Switch version is, more or less, identical to all other versions.
Some review copies were provided in this review, others were paid for.