Pinball Palooza: Momonga Pinball Adventures (PS4)

I’ve always found video games that take pinball and try to apply more traditional video game elements like level progression and a story appealing, but I never really had a strong term to use for this style of game when I encountered one. Momonga Pinball Adventures seems to have hit the nail right on the head though, for what better way to describe playing pinball to clear levels and fight enemies than as a pinball adventure?

Not only does the title give a good name to the genre, but it introduces a lesser known creature to the world in the process. While momonga is a Japanese word that sometimes refers to any flying squirrel no matter the specific species, the Japanese dwarf flying squirrel is specifically referred to as a momonga. What a flying squirrel has to do with pinball becomes a bit clearer if you Google the squirrel, the chubby little critter shaped almost perfectly for pinball action. In Momonga Pinball Adventures, all the momongas are captured by a clan of owls save one, Momo setting off to save his people and getting help along the way from a wise old panda who teaches him how to play, a strong mole that can break things he can’t, and a kung fu firefly who is the only one that can damage the evil owls.

For the most part, Momo makes his way through the world curled up in a ball, the player in charge of the different pairs of flippers found in the levels that will propel Momo to his goals. Unfortunately, the basic pinball mechanics here are a bit rickety. Momo doesn’t react to impacts the way you’d expect him to, the little squirrel appropriately feeling more like a creature of flesh rather than metal but this only hurts the gameplay. If you slam Momo up into the top of one of the game’s many small pinball circles, he loses tons of momentum and slowly rolls away. Other times, he may hug the side walls perfectly even though the angle of your hit should have caused him to deflect off of them instead. It’s hard to get a feel for the way the squirrel will react to coming in contact with something, sometimes even getting outright stuck. Other times, an object he needs to destroy will survive a hard impact from the front or edge but then get broken easily as he lazily rolls into its backside, making it hard to determine what exactly the threshold for power is for completing destruction related objectives. You can usually rely on him to fly in the proper direction in relation to how the flipper hits him, even if he seems to become heavier and slower depending on what he hits after being launched.

The main pinball mechanics are definitely rough, but you won’t likely be too flustered by them because the game does very little to challenge them. Momonga Pinball Adventures has nine main levels, three of which are essentially tutorials, and all of them are pretty small and unambitious. Levels often have a few small pinball areas where you might need to do something like hit the targets to open paths, clear away rocks, defeat owl troops, or get Momo to the right spot before a timer runs out and you have to flip the appropriate lever again. None of these are really given interesting area designs to work against. A lot of the areas are small circular spaces where it’s essentially the flippers, Momo, and any objects relevant to the current task. Need to hit targets? You’ll be in a small space with just those targets and maybe an obstruction near those targets to make it a little less straightforward. Need to fight owls? There’s a bell you need to ring to have your firefly friend help and then whatever owls you need to beat walking around in front of it. The game’s two boss fights at least make better use of bumpers and more complex arena design and can prove interesting challenges for it, but for the most part, these areas are not really terribly designed but would be a better fit for side areas, not the constant focuses in every level. The stages are almost universally unimaginative and spartan, only featuring the tiniest of optional alcoves where you can earn a few more points for your level score.

It’s not very likely you’ll lose in Momonga Pinball Adventures because there are so few bumpers to mess up shots or owls who can actually damage you, but if the ball does slip between your flippers, Momonga will hit a little purple circle that damages him before propelling him back in the action with a little less health. Levels are short so if you did lose it wouldn’t be too impactful, but the game tries to get most of its difficulty out of the many challenges each level has. While you only need to focus on getting to the end of strung together pinball circles on a first play of the level, you can then sequentially play through a few different challenges, things such as doing the level quickly enough, only using a flipper a certain amount of times, collecting all the bonus stars, and more serving as more difficult twists to fairly easy stages. This definitely feels like they’re stretching out the already thin content even further though, most of these not big enough changes to the player’s approach to make up for the plain design of the stages. What’s more, some of them ask for the player to perform an action in a very specific area, and Momonga Pinball Adventures features quite a few magnetic launchers meant to carry you from pinball circle to pinball circle, these easily pulling you away from your challenge’s relevant area if you get too close either by accident or by Momo’s odd physics.

A better change to the gameplay formula comes in the flying sections and three bonus stages. Very rarely, Momo will need to spread his arms and glide through the air, these not really putting too many dangerous obstacles in your path but featuring a lot of bonus stars to motivate you to fly to the left and the right with the buttons usually reserved for the left and right flippers. The most interesting version of this isn’t even part of regular play, the first bonus stage you unlock being an optional dream where the panda character flies infinitely through the sky until he hits a cloud, the player aiming to collect as much food as they can as they fly along. Similarly, the other two bonus levels feature more creativity than the main game. One is a large pachinko table you drop your mole friend down, the player able to lift and lower different parts of the table to move him around to collect more points as he drops. The final bonus stage is the best though, choosing to embrace simple pinball challenges in a long gauntlet where each round has a new objective. The play area is the same but the game introduces more dangerous and crowded areas where you need to aim more carefully and time things better to overcome the latest challenge, and I’d wager that if the game focused on this style of play instead of its attempt to make levels made up of smaller pinball areas, it could have been a more enjoyable title. Instead, it’s a short game packed mostly with weak content that ultimately ends in a cliffhanger for the story, the game still lacking any follow-up almost seven years later but getting ported to more and more systems beyond its initial mobile game release.

THE VERDICT: Momonga Pinball Adventures’s small size is both what prevents it from being worse but also leads to many of its problems. Levels are mostly very plain, sequences of circular pinball areas populated with the bare essentials making for unexciting places to experience the awkward pinball physics, but it can be completed so quickly it doesn’t have the time to really sour the player on the game. The bonus levels that embrace things outside the pinball adventure end up better than the levels the game focuses on, and its attempts to milk the main stages dry with bland challenges makes it unlikely you’ll want to revisit any of them. It’s simplicity keeps it from being downright awful with its failures, but it’s definitely a weak example of the pinball subgenre it chose to chase.

And so, I give Momonga Pinball Adventures for PlayStation 4…

A BAD rating. It almost felt like Momonga Pinball Adventures was trying to guilt me as its loading screen mentions each level takes the development team over a month to make, but time does not necessarily guarantee quality, and there are other pinball adventure games that crafted more detailed and engaging pinball levels, some in a comparable amount of time. Creature in the Well isn’t perfect, but it packed a lot more into a year and a half development than Momonga did, although it’s possible the mobile phone origins of the game lead to a lot of its faults. The simple levels needed to be easily viewed on a phone screen, the challenges are meant to keep you coming back, and the incomplete story was likely meant to lead into episodic releases that the player would have to buy. Unfortunately, this game’s unusual physics and threadbare level design don’t inspire much interest in the base game, let alone a potential follow-up. However, when the game does get a bit more imaginative like with the bonus levels or bosses, it begins to feel like a proper pinball adventure. It’s a shame those moments are basically the sideshow to the weak level designs.

Momonga Pinball Adventures is cute, colorful, and brisk, but it’s built on a weak backbone of poorly implemented pinball action. It’s easy, but that’s mostly because its levels don’t ask much of you, and the challenges that try to introduce deeper play end up feeling tacked on or poorly conceived. Most of its faults are mundane enough they only make the game boring rather than irritating, so while you can squeak through the short experience without feeling too strongly about it, it’s not really worth the small amount of time it asks for since it’s such a lean and imbalanced package.