Roxy Raccoon’s Pinball Panic – PS5 Review

Roxy Raccoon’s Pinball Panic, a game developed by the Canadian indie studio Sinomod Studios, is a unique blend of storytelling and traditional pinball gameplay. Building on the main character from Sinomod’s platformer series, this game puts Roxy in an unexpected role as a pinball in a series of tables. While the premise is intriguing, can it execute on it?  Well, let’s find out.

In the game’s story mode, players must guide Roxy through an array of pinball tables, each with specific score targets to meet. Unlike more complex pinball simulations, Roxy Raccoon’s Pinball Panic simplifies the experience by focusing on hitting spinners, targets, and gems to accumulate points. Achieving these goals grants bonuses such as ball-savers and multipliers, but the core gameplay loop remains repetitive. This simplicity might appeal to casual players, but pinball enthusiasts may find the lack of mini-games and wizard modes disappointing. Moreover, the absence of online leaderboards diminishes the incentive to pursue higher scores.

What the game lacks in terms of variation in the pinball mechanics, it makes up for in its sheer number of tables.  There are dozens of them here and while the Xbox 360 indie game visuals mean that they don’t necessarily stand out from each other, and they all have essentially the same objectives, having this many tables to conquer was pretty impressive.

But any pinball game really stands or falls on its physics.  Games like Pinball FX3 have those down so perfectly that any games like this do need to come correct if they’re going to be taken seriously.  So how does Pinball Panic fare?  Well, not great.  The game is certainly playable enough and is reasonably solid throughout but the ball movement definitely feels janky, the framerate never seemed all that smooth and the ball was prone to getting stuck far too often for our liking.  Especially at the hinge area of your flippers which seems like something you’d fix after even the most rudimentary playtesting.

There’s definitely a bargain basement feel to the physics here.  It’s really apparent if your ball is travelling upwards towards a mid-table flipper as the ball will just go right through it.  And when you add in some questionable table designs, it all starts to fall apart.   There are tables where you’ll have two flippers next to each other but with a gap there, which makes them deadlier than even the worst outlanes in other pinball games.  Or you’ll get tables where there are flippers that feel like they’re the wrong way around.  It’s so unintuitive at times and, in the story mode at least, if you can’t beat the target score on a table, that’s as far as you’ll go.

Thankfully there are other modes that let you just pick whatever table you want to play and there are some other games (mainly Pachinko variants) to mix things up.  We ended up having more fun exploring these tables than we did in the story mode and given that the story is told with in-engine sequences that have the look, timing and direction of the worst early 2000s PC games, you can pretty much ignore these altogether.  The plot wasn’t exactly all that compelling either.

That’s pretty much how the presentation feels across the whole game.  The graphics are mediocre and bland, the sound is badly mixed and has jarring vocal samples and the menu UI fails quite often (a known bug that goes back a couple of years on other formats).  It’s one thing making a simple game but you’ve got to get the basics right if you do that and Pinball Panic just doesn’t manage that.

But, on the plus side, on the tables that don’t completely suck there’s some fun to be had trying to beat those target scores and even though it all gets a bit samey, it’s nice to have a pinball game that isn’t from Zen Studios now and again.  And, of course, as this is an eastasiasoft joint you’ll be getting the PS4 and PS5 versions bundled together and a reasonably easy (but not too easy) Platinum.

There’s definitely the seed of a good idea here and with a bit more polish, charm and technical know-how, the idea of a story-driven pinball game does appeal but Roxy Raccoon’s Pinball Panic still has a lot of work to do before we can recommend it.