Xenotilt: Hostile Pinball Action (2024)

The follow-up to the great 2019 pinball game Demon's Tilt is just as fun and chaotic, with another big three-tiered table packed with objectives and visual flair. Though the game is in Early Access at the time of this review, it already feels like a fully-formed game that just has some details to fix and tweak, and it's getting very regular updates at the moment.

In more ways than one, there's a lot to take in here. The crazy visuals take a bit of getting used to in terms of keeping track of your ball and what's going on, and there's also just a lot of different mechanics and objectives going on to learn about. Once I got settled in, though, I found it very well organized, with pretty clear and predictable objectives that are each isolated to a certain tier of the board. It has been really nice learning this table and how to plan ahead and play off the different tier transitions that are available.

The different bosses and enemies present a pretty enjoyable challenge here, and play into some of the other mechanics pretty well. Shooting smaller enemies with turrets or lasers while cradling the ball allows you a more unobstructed path to hit certain objectives or slam your ball into the boss. These bosses can be a struggle especially on the lower tier of the table where it's easy to get your ball thrown right past the bottom set of bumpers, but they can also kinda "help" you reach certain other things which is fun.

Again, there is some small stuff they can polish as they work through this early access period, but this is already fundamentally one of the more immediately fun and flashy games of this year. There are lots of fun opportunities to improve your score and I definitely intend to keep aiming for higher spots on the leaderboard. I would not hesitate to recommend picking it up now and joining the fun.