There is certainly something prehistoric about the quality of this one. Jurassic Pinball is a one-table pinball experience being sold for £1.79 on the UK Nintendo Switch eShop. At that price, one can't be too mean, even if the game is a barebones piece of crap (which it IS). As barren as it may be, it most certainly is a pinball game, so it achieves everything it sets out to do.
This extraordinarily dull ball and flippers game was seemingly released to compete with the "Jurassic World" themed DLC for Pinball FX3. If you choose this over that, well, that's like buying Tesco Value Margarine instead of CountryLife Butter. You know you'll prefer CountryLife, but you suffer with the lesser cost garbage because you're saving pennies. After time, through blind selfsightedness, you convince yourself it was the right choice and that you really do prefer the bland taste of Tesco Value Margerine.
The controls are set in stone and cannot be remapped. For some reason, the developer felt it apt to put "Tilt" on 12 different inputs on the controller, including the face buttons. The triggers operate the left and right flippers, but there is no button to operate both flippers together. Bafflingly, even when on the main menu, you can still operate the flippers.
Tilt-rannosaurus Rex.
The game contains online ranking, which seems to have been included for the sake of being a toutable game feature that would appear somewhat competent when listed on the game's store description. The venerable set of options you have to pick from are sound effect volume, music volume, and country flag of choice. There sure are a lot of flags to choose from.
The credits screen of the game makes it abundantly clear that the team behind it is very small and that the game was developed with a pinball game development preset for an existing game engine. The team consisted of six people; this game really isn't that bad taking that into consideration. Also taking into account the price, it's really no different than buying a Pinball app for a mobile phone.
Why not drop the "Jurassic" theme and make something new and exciting? Spawn a franchise of their own? Of course not. Capitalize on the new dinosaur movie, of course — easy money.
Ultimately this pinball game certainly isn't the worst of its kind, though it reminds me of the shareware days when a small studio would write a pinball game to compete with the likes of Epic Pinball, eager to ask for $15 in a sealed, stamped addressed envelope in exchange for two more identical pinball tables. Jurassic Pinball feels like one of those shareware demos of old, except you're expected to pay for the trial version.
