Pinball FX3: The Walking Dead (Nintendo Switch) Review

It comes as no surprise that, being based on Telltale's game and plot, The Walking Dead pinball table centres on the events surrounding Lee Everett and Clementine, as Lee is on his way to prison for killing a senator his wife had an affair with when the zombie outbreak occurs and, after a car crash, he happens upon Clementine who is surviving on her own in her tree house, not knowing where her parents currently are. The events displayed, related in the original five episodes of the first season, follow these two protagonists and the group of survivors they stick with for much of the season, although the latter group is not featured prominently in the pinball table.

Naturally, a pinball table does not tell a story as well as an adventure game/visual novel could ever do and understanding the story completely would still require someone to play the source material but, assuming that the player has already done so and picked up the pinball table for that very reason, seeing the events of the first season play out again through the player's actions on the pinball table is awesome indeed. As was the case in the original, and a defining feature especially in the first season, choosing who to help in dangerous situations will affect the outcome of the events and who survives in the end. The missions that can be started by hitting into a zombie coming out of a sewer drainage enough times to clear the way and sink the ball in that makeshift orbit all follow one of the five episodes of the season and, after accomplishing different objectives that were originally in the Telltale's rendition, the same choices have to be made as in the original game, such as choosing to save Carley or Doug, knowing that only one of the two can remain for the rest of the missions after this choice was made.

Something not present in the original, however, is a small mini-game where the player has to look through the scope of a sniper rifle and take down zombie targets that appear at windows in a derelict neighbourhood. Other than that, however, it is still a fairly simple pinball rendition with the table displaying many of the locales encountered in season one, from the streets of Macon and Savannah, to the St. John's Dairy. The table itself is not too complicated to understand but playing through each of the smaller enclosed spaces dotted around the field, in which the table is a lot harder to keep from falling back into the main table, is easier said than done, although required to keep the combos rolling. It is a medium difficulty table where scoring high is only moderately hard to accomplish, which kind of makes sense within Zen Studios' logic of making tables easier or harder to score on based on the target audience, and the audience for the original game is quite varied indeed, the franchise itself being so mainstream and Telltale's game being so beloved by the most hardcore of audiences.

Depending on the events, night can fall on the pinball table and it is in these moments that the improved game engine shines in every sense of the term as light sources cast their light onto the play field and shadows get cast accordingly, so this is mostly where changes from previous versions of the same table can be witnessed: in the aesthetic presentation. Of course, new to this is the usual bonus and upgrades system that is at the core of Pinball FX3 but that goes mostly without saying since every table has these features built in as they are more part of the engine rather than of the tables themselves.