1/17/2024 0 Comments Play 3d space cadet pinball![]() ![]() Where there is a drain for your ball to fall into in a number of puzzles, the penalty is at worst only a few fruit, the game’s currency that you end up with far too much of anyway, and which can easily be made up for the player will then quickly be put back into play to continue trying to solve the physics puzzle. Following on the idea of broad accessibility, there’s no way to die in this game. The humor in it is fairly light, and while it never made me laugh out loud, I found myself enjoying the game for what it was. There’s only a relatively small amount of cartoonish violence, and on the whole, this is a broadly acceptable game. The animal characters in the game are mostly very cutesy, but they aren’t excessively so – they’re basically the sorts of things you’d expect in a family game, generally being fairly one-dimensional, but doing their job in populating the world and giving the player hints in where to go and a small number of quests to do. ![]() Yoku’s Island Express is unapologetically a family game, suitable for people of all ages, so long as they don’t find pinball too frustrating. While the characters are mostly fairly limited in their animation, they still are fun to look at, and there’s a nice variety of environments, from a dark and dreary underground to vibrant tropical beaches to overcast rainforest to snowy mountain peaks. The whole island is very vibrantly colored, and the 2D hand-drawn art here is quite excellent. The game even features (fairly simple) boss fights in the form of pinball tables! The game is also quite aesthetically pleasing. The variety here is reasonable – the game not only has a bunch of traditional pinball, but also has sections where the player must play with what amounts to multiple pinballs at the same time. All of this allows the game to include the secrets and exploration that is key to Metroidvania games, while simultaneously mixing up the gameplay and keeping it fresh and allowing the player to navigate the island and access what amounts to a bunch of environmental pinball tables. Acquired abilities like swinging off of flowers, diving underwater, and sucking up explosive slugs serve to allow the player to access new areas, as well as mixing up the core pinball game with some other pinball-esque environmental navigation. While paddles appear quite heavily in the game, many springboards also appear, launching the player through the air. This allows the game to be more than a bunch of pinball tables, instead interspersing with other forms of environmental navigation. Yoku has no ability to jump and cannot go up steep inclines, requiring you to find other means – the numerous paddles distributed around the world – to make your way around. Yoku can roll the ball around on relatively flat ground, allowing them to move around the island between puzzles and engage in other navigation. ![]() Rather than rolling around a ball of dung, however, Yoku rolls around a large, smooth round stone which doubles as a pinball. The main character of the game is Yoku, a dung beetle who has been appointed as the postmaster of Mokumana Island. Yoku’s Island Express makes use of pinball mechanics to navigate a large 2D island environment, collecting various upgrades that allow you to progress to new areas without fundamentally upsetting the core pinball nature of the game. I have played a couple of creative pinball games in recent years, but this is by far the best of them. ![]() I have played a couple of creative pinball games in Yoku’s Island Express is an open-world 2D Metroidvania Pinball game. Yoku’s Island Express is an open-world 2D Metroidvania Pinball game. ![]()
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