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Zen Pinball is a well known pinball game because of its very realistic game physics, it has been available in multiple systems (like the ps3) and download stores (android, app store). Created by Zen studios, a Software development company based in Budapest, Hungary. Makers of "Ghostbusters: The Video Game" for the DS and "Flipper Critters", alongside many other games for several systems.

Zen Pinball 3D now for the 3DS was announced back in sep 2011, launched in the EU eShop Dec 1 but delayed in the US store. Its been available for quite some time now and i risked a few bucks purchasing it, and man... considering i am a very exigent consumer specially when talking about video games, i consider that this game went beyond my expectations.

The tables are very well made. Zen Pinball 3D may not seem more than a port of the PS3 version with the standard tables, but i was impressed by how the 3D effect enhanced my experience and now i can't play without it. For who is familiar with the PS3 version of Zen Pinball, the game is pretty much the same (even the graphics), this game makes use of the 3DS Anti-Aliasing and high-res textures. Unlike the PS3 version this one runs at 30 fps, according to a Representative of Zen studios in their forum, this is due to the hardware limitation, and since the game was ported from the Playstation 3 the polygon count here is very high, alongside the complexity of gameplay and everything else, lowering this more without hurting the experience was not possible.

But is 30 fps that bad? Well, more is obviously better in this case but the worse effect of 30 frames per second is in your peripheral vision (part of vision that occurs outside the very center of gaze : wikipedia). Since the 3DS has a small screen, 30 fps doesn't hurt really bad and i personally find the game to run very smoothly.

Another thing that might bug the most hardcore games out there is that...this is a pinball game, and details are important, and the 3DS has a small screen (obviously, its a portable machine). Don't worry because you can adjust the camera of the game, and you can pick 8 different views (press X while playing), without mentioning the free view mode (hold X) which pauses your game let you navigate the table with the circle pad in a zoom mode. The game happens in a high-resolution environment with high-res textures so details are really detailed here

Zen Pinball 3D has very beautiful tables, realistic physics and makes great use of 3D. But what about the gameplay?

Well, the game comes with 4 standard tables, each has a theme, a story and missions to accomplish. And before this game i thought pinball was only about getting higher and higher scores, well its not exactly the case in this one. The more i tried to beat my score the harder it was to beat, the secret here is Forget about your score (disabling floating scores and ball trail helps here) and follow the missions, the magic of each table. Going with the flow and relaxing will get you amazing scores!

This game also has online rankings, which features pretty in-human scores and remembers you how horrible you are at Pinball. Scores are sorted by: Overall, My score (shows your ranking based in all scores), My country and Friends! Yep, it shows the score of the people in your friend list. You can see Weekly and All-time scores.

Also, there are 2 different modes of scores, Pro score (your overall performance trough all tables) and Team score, yours and your friends pro-scores together, very social, right?

There are also many other fun features in the game that i will leave you to figure out if you get the game

I'm just a humble reviewer, but i have the right to give the game a score right? I'm giving pinball 95/100 for visuals, 80/100 for gameplay and 90/100 re-playability.

Played the game for 10 hours now, and i can definitely say its one of the best games in the eShop, well worth its price!

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Zen Pinball 3D is available for $6.99 in the US eShop, €4.99 in the EU eShop, $7.50 AUD Australian eShop and £4.50 UK's eShop


and...

It was confirmed by Zen Studios that DLC will become available as soon as Nintendo gets its DLC system working, this means downloadable tables WILL become available! At a price of course, in the App store each table is $1.99 (USD), fair price if you ask me but it might come differently in the eShop since its another store, i hope it does not of course.

So guys...this is where my review ends, thank you a lot for reading and feel free to tell me if i missed anything!

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Leave a comment and thumbs up, or i'm going to throw your Ball out of the table !!

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