I will probably pick up Zen Pinball (PS3) from the PSN sooner or later because you can never have too much pinball. This avault review (3 stars out of 5) does a pretty good job of capturing the flavor of the game and providing a high level overviews of its strengths and weaknesses.
Even though Zen Pinball is obviously a labor of love, it does have some faults that hold it back from greatness. The game is a visual treat, but each table has its own corny voice-over audio tracks that made me cringe every time I heard them. Thankfully, you can crank your personal music playlist to drown out the dialogue. Though the mechanics of the game are sound and functional, ball physics are suspect. For the most part, the physics are adequate, but sometimes the balls seem to move too fast. As a result, I couldn’t react quickly enough when I unlocked the secret segment of a table. Also, the ball finds the gutter more often than it should. Maybe a slow-motion transitioning segment could have fixed this.
I doubt I will pick this one up until I see what sort of DLC will be available. If Zen Pinball is supported in the same manner as HVB, it will probably be a steady staple on the PSN download charts for a while.
