Pinball Heroes PS5 / PS4 Review

This rusty pile of bad pinball tables didn’t deserve a re-release

PS5 screenshot taken by the author.

I love real analog pinball machines, but I also love digital pinball. From older stuff like the 3D Ultra or Pro Pinball franchises, to modern things like The Pinball Arcade or Pinball FX, I’ve played a lot of it.

Virtual pinball has been good for a long time — but if any of the key ingredients are wrong, it turns into a bad video game exercise very quickly. Without the right physics, controls, design, and sound, virtual pinball is laughable and unconvincing.

I had only vague memories of 2009’s PSP game Pinball Heroes before I saw its re-release show up on the PlayStation Store a couple of weeks ago. I remembered it being a totally okay pinball game around launch and thought that maybe I’d write about it as part of my “PlayStation Plus Spotlight” series.

Memories can be deceiving. Pinball Heroes is a terrible game, and it should have stayed buried in history. Some very light improvements for the modern era can’t save it from its awful cheap-looking visuals, kludgy gameplay, or iffy table design. It’s one of the worst first party Sony titles I’ve played across any of their consoles, and I kind of can’t believe that it exists, let alone that Sony decided to put it back out into the world and ask people to…