Devil's Island Pinball

The Good
I have been playing this game for many years now and I think it is one of the pinball games that comes a very lot closer to the real pinball cabinets than most other pinball sim's. Here the people of wildfire studios understand that ball action speed must be very high paced and several sound effects must sound like real clicking and bonking. A multi-ball is not easy to keep in play, and there is a lot to keep going for just like today's modern pinball table. There are different missions to achieve, and many targets to shoot. Some of them are surrealistic like the cannibal mode where savages will do a native dance in a circle on the playfield. Others are only suggestive like the disappearing and reappearing fake big ugly cannibal head. When you keep the ball in play, this game can really rack your score up, as point keep growing, awarded points keep multiplying, and completing missions can earn you millions of points. In this game a skill-shot is already worth 5 million! The graphics in this game are fairly good, they are in sharp eye candy 2 dimensional visuals and for better performance you can scale the resolution back to half of the screen so scrolling won't be necessary. Extra pluses are the extra modes like the zombie ball where you can try to restore a lost ball or the super-ball after mode you can play after achieving lot's of points. It definitely is the icing on the cake for real pinball enthusiasts.

The Bad
What I dislike is that this game is so hard. It feels so unbalanced and as if the playfield is not levelled. You can lose the balls so easily, targets are so extremely hard to hit. From the moment you shoot the ball in play, there isn't a single moment to relax. You need to concentrate not to shoot panicky and stress balls that deliberately miss your targets and bounce back so fast you go flipping like a crazy man. After all these years I still not know how to perfectly hit the targets, I keep missing them. Very often the metal ball will go like a bouncing ball or leave the playfield directly via the side lanes. Nudging will do this game no good, as you often can't catch this special "feeling" to think forward where the ball will be going to. What makes me even more nervous is that shooting the burial ground or the temple are extremely hard when you need it to. It is essential for going into missions and boosting up the score. Even thereafter, the missions want you to shoot lanes and ramps in a special order, that is very difficult to do in the given time, usually only a meager few seconds. Half accomplished missions won't give interesting bonuses. What makes it worse it that shooting the ball in the burial ground or the volcano take too much time to get the ball back into the playfield. To add insult to injury, there aren't that many game options to toggle. You can choose a single screen and that's about it, you cannot change the ball speed or the leveling. Finally I think the music is done wrong completely. It is not catchy or amusing nor does it sound like it's coming from a real pinball cabinet's sound chip.

The Bottom Line
This game gives me heart problems. For every time I play it, I think I lose a few years to live. Considerably, it's a good pinball concept with just too many targets that are too hard to shoot.

The Good
Since this table was released by itself, rather than being added to the 5 tables in Balls Of Steel, there was undoubtedly pressure to add extra table features. So, the table is quite loaded, including 6 ramps, 2 magnetic locks, and 5, count 'em, five multiball modes. And of course, the "big ugly head". :) It continues all the good features of BoS, like video mode, start modes, and the cameo appearances. I'm also going to consider the extra difficulty these extra features give the game a "good thing".

The Bad
For a table with such a long period of development, the voice acting is pretty poor. Or, maybe I just find the characters annoying. The sound seems thrown together while everything else looks well developed. Also, I found myself able to hit certain targets repeatedly while barely touching others, whereas most of the BoS tables were more balanced.

The Bottom Line
If you liked Balls of Steel and, for some reason, grew tired of it, I'd recommend picking this one up. Otherwise, it doesn't have any greatly compelling qualities other than its price.