Gamers of a certain age (like me) might have incredibly fond memories of the Windows pinball game 3D Pinball Space Cadet. Digital pinball games can be magical when they are done right, as my long standing love for this game shows. So colour me intrigued when I saw a zombie based one and thought what if this is for pinball what Plants Vs Zombies was for casual tower defense gaming. You can see our first play here (spoiler alert, it was not like that at all).

So you are a trying to avoid the evil purple goo that is responsible for the fact zombies now ravage the world and you use the magic of pinball to stop them. You move between levels via a hexed based map and acquire coins and pick ups as you go.

The game blurb reallllllllllly made this game seem more interesting than it actually was.

• Fight 50 different types of adorkable zombies by pinballing through a cartoony world
  Your artist probably had more fun making those than we did ‘killing’ them.
• Addicting mashup of classic pinball and zombie defense
  I walked away, there was no addiction here. I checked out and left and I won’t be coming back.
• Epic zombie boss fights that will test your skills
  Zero skill required for this game, and I mean ZERO.
• Random generation of 4 different worlds ensures that no playthrough is the same
  A turd is still a turd, even if you try and make it look different.
• More than 300 trinkets and skills for you to unlock, including legendaries!
  Yay more needless stuff!

House Shiney was so bored by this game Duck actually FELL ASLEEP. He fell asleep!!!
He has never done that before!

Our community didn’t much care for it either.

At least it had PC controller support? I don’t know – maybe its more fun on the Switch? But this is just… there are no words, just a series of exacerbated noises that convey irritation and boredom to the Nth degree.

Having played this awful game I am tempted to reinstall 3D PSC just to remind myself of how well these games can be done, so thank you for that.

Shiney Rating
0 paws out of 5
A filmy plot barely holds together a series of skill-less levels that just involve mindless flicking. Flicking a ruler off the end of a table to make different sounds is both more interesting and entertaining. It has made me miss the old Windows pinball game though, so I appreciate that a lot. So not worth £12.99!