"Appulse" Puts an Explosive Twist on Pinball!
Pinball with lasers? Sure, why not!
Ah pinball, a staple in arcades for decades. When I was younger, I had an arcade near my house that had not only hunderds of arcade machines, but dozens of pinball stations themed around Star Wars, Back to the Future, and even Super Mario; there was a pinball machine themed around everything! For all intents and purposes, it's a timeless game. It's just a metal ball, a couple paddles, and hours of achieving the highest score you can possibly get.
But what if the pinball machine was a spaceship and your pinball was strapped with blasters, all for the sole mission of defending said ship from a robotic takeover?
Yeah I'm sure almost nobody had that idea, but that is the premise of Appulse: Pinball Shooter , a pinball-shmup? roguelike? Truthfully, I don't even know what to call this game, but what I'm trying to say is it's a neat spin on a game everyone is already familiar with.
Raw Fury
Appulse is the fusion between pinball, top down shooter and roguelite where you need to protect your mothership from invading robots. Each shot affects your ball's trajectory, allowing you to control it in the heat of the battle. Upgrade your equipment and conquer new spaceships to win the war!
In Appulse, your objective is to defend your mothership from robot invaders. To do so, you must gain points by hitting bumpers and capsules across the map, with your ball leveling up after enough score is accumulated in your run. There are phases that alternate in a run, those being Scoring and Battle, so in between enemy waves you have to get as many points as possible to destroy all the robots in your path before they destroy your mothership. These level ups give you multiple options to augment your run, including: upgrading the ammo reload rate of your weapon,
The combat was a little tricky to get the hang of, but once I got into the groove it became far more satisfying to pull off. On a controller, you use the triggers to operate the pinball paddles, aim with the left stick, and fire your weapon with the left face button (in my case it was square since I played this with a PS5 controller). It sounds simple in writing, but pulling it off is another challenge entirely. Since it's pinball at its core, you have to fire and aim while airborne and zooming around the map. Shooting a ball into an enemy will also damage it, so it's not entirely reliant on projectile damage, but it helps to be adept at both. A significant detail in the gunplay is that shooting your weapon gives recoil, so you can shoot a few bullets to move yourself around which can come in clutch if you're about to drop out of the map.
While the demo only allowed me to try one level, I was able to get a grasp of what the game had to offer fundamentally as well as how some of the more roguelike elements are expected to work. In the main menu, you have an upgrades tab where you can unlock perks that appear on the map by spending the points you accumulated on your runs via a skill tree. These include a dash with a cooldown, and repair packs that can restore health to your mothership if you're in a tight spot.
While there wasn't a whole lot to explore in the demo, I think Appulse is set to be a solid pinball-shooter-roguelike hybrid. With the skill tree and simple but entertaining gameplay loop, this is definitely the kind of game you'll want to give a try on a Steam Deck. I encourage you to check out the demo for this one!