Pinball Palooza: Rollers of the Realm (PC)
An increasing number of games have started taking pinball gameplay and using it as the backbone for full-fledged adventures, but Rollers of the Realm is the first I’ve seen that has made a role-playing game out of it. Earning levels, purchasing equipment, and even having a party of characters with different skillsets are all there, meaning that it truly is a role-playing game despite its action and progression stemming from hitting balls about with flippers.
Rollers of the Realm refers to most of its characters by the name of their class, meaning our heroine goes by the simple title of Rogue. The Rogue is a down on her luck thief who scrapes by in a fantasy medieval kingdom, and while her adventure begins as one of simple survival, soon she begins to encounter the drunken and disgraced Knight, a Swordsman from the Western lands, and many others adventurers who are all getting roped into a grander narrative. The Realm is the area the game takes place in, this region of the world ruled over a greedy baron who seems to be acting more violent than usual and collaborating with robed cultists on something big. Fighting your way through his forces, you begin to learn more about The Realm’s history, and there is an interesting gradual evolution to the myth you hear near the beginning of the adventure. Long ago, The Realm was saved by a band of warriors who faded into legend, the trio of heroes practically deified by the modern people and a woman from the story known as The Witch serving as their embodiment of all things awful. Beginning as background flavor to guide the hearts of the heroes and villains, soon your developing story intersects with this past, and while the main narrative mostly comes out to be an effective but fairly standard hero’s journey, there are still story beats along the way that keep the story fun and interesting.
Your adventure across The Realm takes place across a few small regions, all of them split into little levels that are mostly made up of a single pinball table. Some stages may have an additional area or two to push through such as making your way through a town at night or entering a cave from the forest table, but all of them are fairly small to allow for you to better handle the objectives put out before you. Most levels in Rollers of the Realm involve you fighting against the Baron’s men or undead creatures, there being actual people standing in the field for you to try and hit with your balls. All of your characters are represented by color-coded balls of different sizes though, and using whatever flippers are available, you need to most often slam your ball into the enemies until they’re all gone or a boss foe until it has been defeated. There is usually a pair of flippers near the middle with each having a health bar, and while enemies will try to smack away your ball after it hits them, most of them are really performing a slow march to deal damage to these flippers, some enemies like the archers and mages exclusively targeting them from afar as you play. The more damage these flippers take, the smaller they get, and these often defend you from the spot where your character will die if they end up slipping through to the skull symbol. Some levels have multiple skull symbols as well, but your healer has a passive ability where she can repair these flippers as she gathers mana.
Depending on the battle situation and the table, you’ll want to pick your hero ball that is the best fit for the situation. The Rogue can backstab baddies, the Knight is powerful and able to smash through barriers better than the others, and characters like the hunter can target small creatures like bats with his bow to prevent them from draining your magic meter. Each character has special abilities they can call on such as the hunter calling in a multiball, the Knight turning the skull symbols into shields so he can’t be eliminated, and the Swordsman receiving a boost to his strength by setting his weapons ablaze. However, while some like the Knight’s can be situationally useful, there is a small problem with the magic system. Having a nearly full mana bar is required to revive any fallen characters in a level, and many stages have an objective that is much better handled by someone like the Knight or Rogue. Each new party member is essentially an extra life so having a larger party either by meeting them in the story or recruiting them at the port is still beneficial, but for the most part, you only really need a handful of them for the actual gameplay, most other characters best for building up mana for the revivals. It doesn’t help that some characters like The Alchemist don’t have a clearly pronounced niche, but there are some stats that can make one ball a better choice than another. Besides the obvious one of how much damage they deal to the abundant enemies, you can influence the movement of your ball while it’s rolling, more agile characters much easier to control and thus better at hitting objectives or getting into special areas. Again though, the Rogue pretty much covers this base and a few others due to her having good agility on top of her extra traits.
The heavy favoring of certain characters will likely continue even as you gather gold and spend it on equipment. Outside of the enemies you often need to defeat, many levels will have small objects like barrels, urns, or targets you can hit with your ball to earn cash and mana. The gold can be spent at the port to purchase new equipment, but unless you want to repeat levels to grind for it, you’ll probably want to invest it in the few main characters or hold off until you can hire a new mercenary to essentially serve as an extra life for stalling until someone better can be revived. Some equipment options provide very small bonuses anyway or only impact the magic moves that lesser heroes will probably not end up using, but in most levels there are treasure chests you can work on opening to get permanent free upgrades for a member of the party. In fact, some levels exist solely to provide you more resources, these often containing a good amount of treasure to farm if you need it, but the level up system makes grinding a little more difficult. Lose in a level and all the resources you gathered during it are thrown out, so going up against a level with enemies or a tough objective is risky. When there aren’t enemies on screen the game usually has there be no penalty for letting the ball slip through the central flippers at least, the focus in those areas usually on minor puzzles or shooting your ball to the right areas.
Because of the size of the play fields and the control you are given over your ball’s movement, Rollers of the Realm’s levels can ask for some precision without it being a tall ask. Hitting targets or enemies can take a few tries if your flipper timing is off, but if viewed purely for getting the ball where it needs to go, then Rollers of the Realm has done a great job designing its levels. However, almost any objective that does require hitting multiple enemies over and over is made tedious because of how many times you need to hit the points of interest. Hitting a boss or hiding enemy is usually made a little difficult so that getting the ball to them is a challenge, but doing it again and again loses its luster, especially if you lose your good balls and need to spend time building up magic for revives. A lot of Rollers of the Realm feels like it’s dragging because of the time it takes to whittle down the opposition, but the physics are reliable enough that someone who is normally good at pinball can reliably complete tasks without too much wasted time. The size of enemy health bars does make the Arena Mode a less thrilling prospect though, but even it has a few interesting gimmicks such as a level shaped like a more traditional pinball table rather than taking the story mode’s route of trying to design ruins, battlefields, and towns that accommodate flippers in somewhat believable designs.
THE VERDICT: A pinball RPG is an intriguing concept, but despite having everything it needs to qualify as part of both genres, Rollers of the Realm hasn’t quite found the proper way to blend them together. The pinball actually has a good degree of control and is given interesting tasks to do that match the medieval fantasy story, but the battles often drag on and have few new gimmicks to make them standout. Your party serving as extra balls and having special abilities ensures you don’t just feel like you’re just playing reskinned pinball, but only a few of them get to shine, and equipment purchases have to be funneled into them as a result. There is a high level of mechanical strength to the pinball and good table design on show, but the objectives don’t complement them because of how slow they make the game feel at times.
And so, I give Rollers of the Realm for PC…
An OKAY rating. Despite the often tedious battles, there is still quite a bit to like in Rollers of the Realm. The condensed table design means your targets are never too difficult to reach, it’s just a shame the game tried to make up for this by making objectives slow to complete. Your party is an interesting band of adventurers and it is nice to find a moment where one who rarely has the chance to shine gets to come into play and do some work, but mostly you’ll lean on the same few and any time spent with the others feels like a downgrade. Unless you want to invest a lot of time intro dry gold farming and leveling up then the other characters can’t pull their weight too well, and the story wraps up well before you’d have need to make your party too strong. The story is at least a fun one to follow with its own bits of lore that allow for neat twists and characters moments, but the fact the central characters go by their class names is a pretty clear indication that the game mostly focuses on building up The Realm itself rather than diving too deep into lives of your heroes and other non-playable characters.
Rollers of the Realm is a fun experiment in mixing together pinball with a more complex genre, and it didn’t turn out too bad considering what it was attempting. The pinball mechanics would have been a perfect fit for the game if it had gone for a longer adventure where it shortened stages but had many more of them, and that extra time could have allowed for other characters to come into their own and possibly even lead to some greater character development beyond the few main players. If you’re not put off too much by the sometimes plodding pace, Rollers of the Realm is still an interesting exploration of where pinball video games can be taken.