Williams™ Pinball 17+

Like it, but…

The app would he perfect, but all the options, extras, customizations etc. are a total mess! Just playing, because I don’t know how to advance with all these possibilities there are available. Frustrating.

OK Pinball but with F2P grind and issues

I don’t hate the F2P mechanics in this game but they do feel out of place in a pinball game. The daily challenges are a nice distraction and if that’s all you are looking for, a few minutes distraction, this game will do the trick.

You get Attack from Mars for free and it’s a nice table so that’s good but unlocking additional tables takes extreme grinding of daily objectives or you can purchase them outright for about 10 bucks each (~7 if you buy a bundle) which is far too high a price. And of course you purchase tables with a hard currency that is packaged so you have to buy more than you need. I’ve been playing daily for about 3 weeks and have yet to collect enough “table parts” to unlock any additional tables just for normal play but I have been able to access a number of tables only for daily challenges so the game decides which ones I get to play and only for brief sessions.

The tables themselves are fairly indistinguishable from the recreations in Pinball Arcade which doesn’t include all the F2P BS and while the tables aren’t cheap they aren’t 10 bucks each. If you just want digital pinball on your mobile that’s a better option.

Update: I’ve now tried the multiplayer and it’s terrible. First it’s basically gambling since it wants you to pay real money to play with a chance of winning more back. There are match types that dont require cash, at least at the start as it provides some of the “z” points needed to start a match but pay or no, it also doesn’t let you pick the table. There are many options for match types but they all are on the same table and in my case it’s a table I haven’t unlocked to play so there is no opportunity to practice without buying the table. I assume at some point the table will change but I’ve checked back over a number of days and it’s always the same.

I’ve encountered a few annoying issues:

Pulling the plunger mechanics are very bad. On many tables I struggle to get enough power to even get the ball in play and skill shots that require precise plunger pulls are impossible. In many cases I start my pull at the highest possible point on the screen, pull down until there is no screen left and watch my ball weakly get shot up with just barely enough power to enter the playing field.

Failing daily challenges forces you to watch a results screen that takes its time counting your score that you already know wasn’t enough, the whole time telling you “congratulations” even though you already know you failed the challenge. You are forced to watch this screen for way too long before you are allowed to go back to the challenge menu and retry the challenge. This is so frustratingly annoying. If I fail a challenge I should immediately be asked if I want to try again with an instant restart and it definitely should not be telling me “congratulations” when I failed.

Screen is too small for pinball. I play on iPhone 8+ which is a fairly big screen but still too small to accurately play these types of pinball tables. I already mentioned the issue with the plunger but even beyond that it’s just difficult to get the precision you need when everything is so small. I’m very familiar with a lot of these tables and I struggle here to get scores half as good as the scores I’d get on real tables or even a bigger screen.

Developer Response ,

Thank you very much for the feedback. Williams Pinball works as a free-to-play game so it has a different pricing structure than the more conventional other versions. The mobile version is mainly designed for playing challenges. I believe we still haven't achieved the balance between users who want to get the tables and bypass the challenges and those who like to play the challenges so they could upgrade the tables. Thank you for writing regarding this - it really helps us.
I created an issue about your reports of the physics and forwarded it to the developers.

every action ends up with an internal error

The app is currently at unplayable state. Generic Internal Error is thrown each time the server is being connected