Momonga Pinball Adventures

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Momonga Pinball Adventures is what looks a lot like a mobile app that's been dumped on Steam as if it was a real PC game (it's not)... it's a cash grab from greedy mobile devs trying to cash in on abandoned app store stuff. The mobile app is a promising and interesting concept, a hybrid of pinball and brickbreaking games like Breakout/Arkanoid. Fling a squirrel as your ball around various grassy looking mini-pinball tables, smash various targets and fling the ball to the exit. The problem is that this high potential concept was completely wasted as a very, very poorly done mobile app instead of being a, well, seriously developed game. Momonga Pinball Adventures is an older mobile app from 2016. It's a venerable 8 years old at the time of this review. From a technical perspective, as a mobile app, this doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. The mobile app features low-polygon "retro" assets with cartoony, mobile app style shader effects, making this look like a barely functional mobile app from 15 years ago. This visual style is a method that lazy devs often use when they have a lack of interest/capability to create highly detailed, high poly models and instead use shader effects to disguise that shortcoming under the name of "art", or "We made it look bad on purpose", which really isn't something gamers should have to put up with. It's unclear why the developers weren't willing to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets and high resolution textures for the mobile app. It's far below the state of the art visuals gamers expect as a result of their decisions. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the mobile app unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. In fact this is one of the worst parts of this mobile app. Fans of pinball games will be accustomed to using the shift or control keys on either side of the keyboard, but the developers of this mobile app had never seen a PC before or played a PC game, so the paddle controls are locked to the arrow keys. Remember those? They were used for gaming back in 1985. Mobile devs consistently make gaming worse for everyone. Because this is a mobile app, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the iPhones that the mobile app was designed for. These are unfortunate handicaps and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was an afterthought for the iPhone developers who are to blame for this. The mobile app is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for mobile phones forces upon a game. Once more, mobile devs have made gaming worse for everyone. I didn't spend thousands on building a gaming rig just so I could pretend it's an iPhone. I could see evidence it was on mobile phone app stores, but it seems to have been (understandably) removed from those platforms... this is most likely because Google and Apple have quality control, Valve does not. Regardless, for all intents and purposes Momonga Pinball Adventures is effectively a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers. We don't spend all this money building gaming rigs so we can pretend they're iPhones and play games that might as well be mobile apps. These technical defects push this mobile app below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this mobile app was with players reveals a surprise... there's a modest spike in player counts for the mobile app. But this only happened once, around the same time that trading cards were applied to the mobile app... so this is just card idlers getting their cards and moving on. A closer look at the numbers shows the mobile app just has a couple of players every week running up the mobile app and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many mobile apps like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards. So, should you buy this mobile app? Is this one of the best of the 110,000+ games on Steam? Momonga Pinball Adventures has the completely unrealistic cash grab price of around $6 USD (Six bucks for a mobile app!!!!), it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. Because this is the kind of game you can just play for free on mobile phones, it's impossible to recommend anyone should pay money for the same experience on Steam. This is also competing with over 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.