Pinball FX - My Little Pony Pinball Review

Pinball FX - My Little Pony Pinball by developer and publisher Zen Studios—Sony PlayStation 5 Review written by Nick with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Pinball FX - My Little Pony Pinball proves that Zen Studios can take pretty much any theme, and make a solid pinball table out of it. While the theme of this one doesn’t really hold any appeal to me, I can’t deny that it’s pretty well done and should appeal to a younger, slightly different demographic than many of the other Pinball FX titles out there.

If names like Applejack, Rarity, Fluttershy and the show’s music are all familiar to you, then Pinball FX - My Little Pony Pinball is probably right up your alley. Admittedly, I don’t really know the property myself – even my youngest kid is twenty one years old, so I’ve likely long but passed by being the target audience for this one.

That being said, this table would be an excellent one for helping those who do enjoy My Little Pony, or are perhaps new to the Pinball FX ecosystem, as it is certainly one of the easier tables to play. The flippers are close together at the bottom, making it quite easy to keep the ball in play. I don’t know that I’ve yet to lose one down the center of the table – it’s usually off to the sides (and even those start with a one-time save on each side to kick the ball back into play). Whether this is real or perceived, the ball just seems slower and floatier as well as it soars about the table. My first round playing, I lasted nearly half an hour, and I wasn’t in any way familiar with the layout of the table yet.

The table does not have quite as much going on as more advanced ones I’ve played, but there’s still some cute missions baked in here such as gathering apples or cooking up cupcakes. As the pinball moves across the table, it even has a rainbow tail trailing along behind it. If it were any more vibrantly colorful and sweet, it would be digital sugar. The visuals are pleasant and should appeal to fans of the property, while the sound effects and voice acting seem perfectly good as well. I’m not familiar with the show itself, but I decided to look up whether or not the voice cast was used for the sayings on this table. General consensus seems to be that the voice for Twilight is, but the others are inconclusive. Regardless, their speaking parts are all nice and fit the overall presentation, even if they did get pretty repetitive after a time. My wife was making dinner in the adjacent kitchen as I played this table and asked at one point how often they were going to repeat themselves.

In terms of the table layout, it’s visually interesting. There’s a lot of ramps and rails, which make it seem bigger and busier than it really is. It took me several tries to get the ball up the rainbow ramp near the center as I got a feel for the aforementioned floaty-ness of the table. Some tables feel very vertical, but Pinball FX - My Little Pony Pinball is not really one of them. It has the rails and ramps, but there’s not a lot to do at the top of the table, and even when stuff is happening up there, it’s kind of obscured by the cloud-like bumpers and the upper level platforms.

Obviously I’m not the target audience for this particular table, but I think Pinball FX - My Little Pony Pinball would resonate with a younger crowd, especially so if they’re fans of the source property. I can appreciate how impossibly cute the whole thing is, but this is likely not going to be one of the tables I go back to on a regular basis either, as there’s other themes that appeal to me more and feel more challenging than this one. On the whole I’d say it’s above average, but not really for me.

Score: 6.75 / 10