Review: DaVinci Pinball
Score:
65%
Sometimes you come across an application or game that's a triumph of form over function - the pinball simulation here is one such, looking a million dollars but ultimately far less satisfying than other pinball titles on Windows Phone. DaVinci Pinball's heart (and face) is in the right place, with visuals that are often stunning, with a table design that beggars belief and audio that adds centuries of atmosphere, yet the playability of the pinball game itself is fatally flawed and, it has to be said, buggy.
The concept of mixing Leonardo da Vinci with pinball is an odd one, to be sure, but it's implemented superbly in terms of creating mechanical excitement and mood. Techno-enhanced renaissance chants float in the background, there are inspirational quotes from the great master spoken when you fire off a ball, plus the table is chock full of steam-punk-renaissance (see what I did there, a whole new genre!) gadgetry. Cogs and levers, funnels and ratchets, lights and (of course) various sizes of flippers, scattered appropriately around quite a large pinball table.
Hit the right targets in the right sequence (DaVinci Pinball's table logic is complex, but there's an enormously detailed illustrated help screen, thankfully, shown below) and things start to happen, with various DaVinci inventions brought to life in pseudo-3D, right up to the famous helicopter concept. These shuttle your ball around and add a not inconsiderable amount of 'wow' to the game.
This being an Xbox Live game, there are achievements (shown above, right) and gamer points to be won, though it's never made clear exactly how you get some of the titles above or how many points you earn. In 'trial' mode, by the way, Xbox Live gamer points are obviously locked out, plus you're also limited to a million points.
Unfortunately, DaVinci Pinball is flawed in two major ways, one temporary and one (probably) permanent. Firstly, it's buggy, with my ball getting 'stuck' between two bumpers several times, i.e. in an infinite cycle, and with numerous other glitches reported from others. There's been an update to the game in late April, but the version number remains at v1.0.0.0 and the glitch reports are from two weeks after the update, so it seems as if the developers still have some work to do.
If the rest of DaVinci Pinball were perfect then these bugs would be what I focussed right in on, but in fact the overall score is low because of the interface used - bugs can be found and fixed but it'll take a major rewrite to change the way the virtual pinball table looks in your hands.
You see, DaVinci Pinball lets you play in two ways. The first, and I suspect the original vision for the game by the designers, is a 'flying' camera: to have a dynamic, 3D, graphically impressive close-up of where your ball is, with this portrait-only viewport on the renaissance mechanical action moving up and down the table as needed, keeping the ball roughly centred at all times. With the view this close, all the detail in the graphics is accessible and appreciated.
It's flawed for playing pinball with though, since you don't get a feel for where your main flippers are when you can't see that far back down the table. So the ball is flying down the table, somewhere near the centre line - should you try and catch it on your left flipper tip? Or the right? And how can you time the flipper pulse for maximum reach into the centre of the table? Answer: you have no idea, because you can't see enough of the table.
I think the developers realised this, too late, and had to change tack, introducing a second optional camera mode, 'static' (shown above, right), in which you see the whole table at once, at a much lower detail level. This makes playing the game successfully easier, but there's far less pleasure in wanting to, since you can't see many of the lovely graphical touches.
What's needed is a more intelligent 'flying' mode, along the lines of that in the excellent Dr Pickaxe, in which the camera motion and detail levels follow almost exactly what your eyes would do naturally on a real pinball table - when you need to follow the ball up, then up the camera goes, when you need to see where it's headed down below, the camera's there ahead of you, so you can judge your flipper strike(s). Can the 'flying' mode here be modified in such a way? I'm not sure. I think the developers simply didn't play the game themselves enough and so didn't anticipate this gameplay problem, and so we're left with something that looks and sounds gorgeous, but which is tricky to play in the manner of a pinball power gamer (like me).
Which is a crying shame. This is, in my opinion, a game classic that's fatally flawed. If a miracle happens and the title becomes more playable then I'll report back. In the meantime, the developers can thank the gorgeous table design, graphics and sound for the score being as high as it is.
[NB. Apparently DaVinci Pinball was available first on the iPhone and iPad. Comments welcome on whether it's any more playable on this hardware]
Reviewed by Steve Litchfield at