Andrew Newton reviews Zen Pinball 2 Star Wars Pinball: Star Wars Rebels…
For those of you who don’t know, Star Wars: Rebels is an animated adventure set in the Star Wars universe. The series centres around a rag-tag crew of the Starship Ghost as they continue the fight against the evil Empire.
The recent table from Zen centres around these rebels adventures and, like many of their tables, Rebels is very nicely set out. The table itself looks like it is set in a hangar or starport with walkways and a nice little landing pad for starship Ghost. The Ghost is also animated and periodically flies off or lands depending on what is happening on the table at the time.
Like the characters in the animation you must complete various missions with each character having a mini game. Personally, I prefer the one for Chopper, the Ghosts C1 Astromech Droid, whose mini-game involves a sort of Arkanoid type game where you control him to prevent the ball slipping back onto the table whilst bouncing the ball back to light up panels on the top. Some of these mini-missions are easy to achieve whilst others such as Zeb’s mini-game are frustratingly tricky and requires speed in order to prevent the Stormtroopers from reappearing once you knock them down.
The feature about the missions which stands out most for me over other tables is the ability to choose your mission once they are activated. This is a really nice feature that allows you to either complete the missions you know how to do or to concentrate on a more challenging quest. This also makes this table one of the easier ones to build up points rapidly.
There are many bits of dialogue used throughout the game and plenty of one liners from the characters but these do get played frequently and after half an hour of playing you do get fed up of hearing the same thing. Though this is a minor annoyance in terms of the sound. The music to the game however is excellent and I believe it has been taken straight from the TV series which is a very nice touch.
In my opinion this is one of Zen’s best Star Wars tables to date. There is a challenge but thanks to the mission select feature the challenge is much more enjoyable as you can do what you want in the order you want to do it in. Rebels really captures the animated programme, the animation is nice and smooth and the music and sounds are taken straight from the series. If you like pinball and you like Star Wars then this is one table you have to get.
Rating: 9/10
Andrew Newton
https://youtu.be/8HTiU_hrLms?list=PL18yMRIfoszFLSgML6ddazw180SXMvMz5
Originally published May 6, 2015. Updated April 14, 2018.
