Smoots Pinball from JanduSoft and Kaneda Games brings us five tables based on the arcade-style Smoots titles. Find out more in our Smoots Pinball review!

Smoots Pinball from JanduSoft and Kaneda Games brings us five tables based on the arcade-style Smoots titles. There are five pinball tables to play: Baseball, Summer Games, Tennis, Golf, and Zombie. All tables control the same, so you’ll be using the L1 button to activate the left-side paddles on the table, while, as expected, the R1 button will control those on the right side of the table. You can try to tilt the table a bit by pressing the X button, but you need to be careful because if you overdo it, the table will freeze your paddles, forcing you to lose your ball. Oh, and the X button will also be used for launching the ball.

As you can tell by looking at the screens and trailer in this Smoots Pinball review, all pinball tables are very basic and feature a similar overall look. This is aggravated by having all pinball tables shown from the same static camera view, which is far from ideal for a pinball collection where you need to be able to quickly follow the ball as it bounces all over the place. Not being able to zoom in, or even the camera angle really hurts this one.

The pinball table is in the middle of the screen, and the rest of the screen is occupied by elements such as a camera crew an officer, and benches on the tennis table, stands and a parking lot on the baseball table, graves, and dead trees on the zombie table, a windmill, buildings, and lots of trees and grass on the gold table, and even a whole track field on the summer games table. I understand that these elements are there to try and add some extra life to each table, but they only end up distracting you.

There’s also not a lot to do in each of the tables. There are some elements to hit for extra points, such as bumpers that will make some noise and add some bonus points, and maybe a ramp or a rail you can loop the ball around, but that’s about it. You can try to increase your score multiplier to get your name on the leaderboard or unlock a multiball if you’re lucky, but there are no events to work on, which is not what you expect from a pinball table.

With this one being a Cross-Buy title, that means you can download both the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 versions of the game to your PlayStation 5 at no extra cost and work on unlocking the Platinum trophy that each version has to offer. Each trophy list is split into 12 Bronze trophies, 14 Silver trophies, and 5 Gold trophies for you to work on. What do you need to do to get those trophies? You’ll have to get over 250,000 points in all five tables to get a pair of trophies for each of them, activate the multiball in each table, and miscellaneous objectives specific to each table. These include defeating every zombie in a single turn at the zombie table, using the windmill rail five times on a single ball on the golf table, or hitting the ball five times in less than 10 seconds on the tennis table.

Smoots Pinball brings us five tables based on the arcade-style Smoots titles. Unfortunately, the tables are very basic, and not being able to move the camera around and change your view are far from ideal. There’s not much to do in each of the five tables, and with tables that are not fun to play, there’s not much to recommend here. Smoots Pinball is out as a Cross-Buy title, so your $5.99 purchase will allow you to download both the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 versions of the game.

Disclaimer
This Smoots Pinball review is based on a PlayStation 5 copy provided by JanduSoft.