Strap in and tighten your focus because Zombie Rollerz: Pinball Heroes is a chaotic whirlwind of action.
Pinball is, in my opinion, a staple of the classic ‘arcade’ feel. Is it an arcade if you head into an arcade and don’t see a pinball machine? Hard to say. And while physical arcades have more or less fallen out of popular culture, their spirit lives on in the digital realm. Arcade-style games continue to exist and continue to offer players tons of casual, low-stakes fun.
However, the development of video games has allowed arcade games, including pinball games heavily included, to expand outwards to an exciting degree. After all, virtual pinballs do not need to strictly follow anything as silly as the law of gravity as they do in real life.
And that leads into Zombie Rollerz. Published by Daedalic Entertainment, Zombie Rollerz is quite the interesting mix of pinball action and… roguelike. Yup, you read right. Zombie Rollerz takes quite the hefty swing at mixing up the classic pinball formula by throwing some roguelike features into it. But how does it work?
Well, to begin with, Zombie Rollerz is a pinball game, first and foremost. Everybody knows how pinball works, but for those who don’t, Zombie Rollerz follows the control scheme to a ‘T’: you have your pinball, and you control two (or occasionally more, on later levels) flippers, which you use to blast the ball around each arena. However, in slight opposition to typical pinball mechanics, you toss your pinball into the field via a rather large ballista, which is about as fun as it sounds. Very.
Now, here’s where the game mixes it up a bit, and where it incorporates the zombies. For the most part, your gameplay goal in Zombie Rollerz is to kill all of the zombies. Simple, right? Well, that’s done by taking your pinball and bowling them over. There are a multitude of different mini arenas for you to fight zombies in, with your goal typically to re-kill every last little undead sucker. From what I found, Zombies usually take a hit or two to go down, but things move quickly enough that it’s far from a problem.
In addition to the zombies, there are also objects to interact with in these arenas. These range from simple things like destructible objects like boxes to things like wells that launch water bombs or furnaces that spew flames to help you take care of the hordes of zombies, to even little entrances to secret portions of the level that you can use to collect money, health, and other rewards. These features add some much-needed variety to the level layouts and can make hitting those zombies that much more exciting.
And now for the roguelike aspect of Zombie Rollerz. To begin with, you start with a single hero, the aptly named Burnjamin, whose starting kit is filled to the brim with fire-based abilities. You then set out into an explorable overworld, where you can follow specific paths to find treasure, visit all sorts of special events, and find zombies to engage with.
These events also do incredibly well at breaking up Zombie Rollerz’s main gameplay loop and preventing things from seeming too repetitive. Little treasure hunting or puzzle-solving mini-games are dotted around the overworld, alongside things like shops to buy from and shrines to pray at for bonuses. While the main gameplay thrives in its typical arenas of zombie flattening action, these little breaks do wonders for keeping you wanting to play.
And to prevent things from seeming too slow, there is also a system in Zombie Rollerz’s overworld to usher you along, where the ground behind you will fill with a hazard (such as lava in the fire area or a poisonous cloud in the forest area), which will sap your HP if you move through it. It’s an interesting ‘incentive’ to keep you moving, but I never really found myself particularly bothered by it.
Continuing with the roguelike aspect, as you play through runs in Zombie Rollerz, you’ll earn XP based on how far you get and what kind of things you manage to accomplish. This XP will unlock rewards along a track, one by one, which will be added to your repertoire for further potential use. This includes things like additional heroes and new skills to play with.
One minor detail I found unfortunate about Zombie Rollerz’s unlocks was in regards to the heroes themselves. From what I found, all heroes seemed to start somewhat distinguishable from the other heroes, but tend to smear together as you collect more power-ups and skills.
This is because all heroes have access to the same power-ups and skills and use them simultaneously. It’s unfortunate because all of the heroes are incredibly interesting, visually, and felt pretty different at the beginning of the game. However, they end up being more ‘starting kits’ than ‘unique characters’, in my opinion.
Zombie Rollerz is very fun, in a hyperactive, ‘kid hopped up on caffeine’ sort of way, but I did have one pretty solid gripe about it that made things slightly more difficult for me than I felt like they needed to be. That problem was that, after the tutorial, I felt like the game just stopped explaining things to me.
This, in and of itself, is not necessarily a problem, especially considering the ‘roguelike’ descriptor that I’ve already given Zombie Rollerz. After all, roguelikes are meant to be hard, and I feel like part of the difficulty of roguelikes is figuring out how certain mechanics play with each other and how best to exploit them.
However, my situation with Zombie Rollerz felt less like I was not properly connecting with the mechanics and more like I had to figure out how things worked myself. For example, nothing in the overworld sections felt particularly explained to me outside of clearing obstacles. The creeping hazard and the way zombie fights and puzzles (but not shops, obstacles, or treasure) advance the ‘in-game time’ both went unexplained to me, which I feel could have warranted at least a ‘heads up’.
It was a bit annoying having to learn that kind of thing the ‘hard’ way, but the gameplay of Zombie Rollerz was casual and light enough that I didn’t feel particularly punished for not understanding some things, which I think is a plus.
Despite that, Zombie Rollerz was very fun and engaging for what it offered. It might not have been particularly deep, and the writing may have been a touch messy (I feel like it could have benefited from another read-over), but the gameplay was fast-paced and chaotic in precisely the right ways. And in a game like this, I think that’s what matters.
And that’s going to finish up our review for Zombie Rollerz: Pinball Heroes. If you want to check out the game itself, you can check it out on Steam, Nintendo Switch, or the Apple App Store.
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