Devil’s Crush (Virtual Console) Review

Pinball is evil. Shooting for the next high score becomes an obsession that takes up weeks of a person’s life, and the task is not made easy when the ball keeps falling in the worst possible places. You could say pinball is a kind of hell. In Devil’s Crush, pinball is hell. No, really. What else could it be when the table is inhabited by dragons, skeletons, demons, scary monks, and… and… and… heavy techno music?!

Devil’s Crush only features one gothic table, but it’s a big one. The table spans three screens and shifts accordingly depending on where the ball is. It’s a neat effect to hit the ball up a tier and play in a different area since each tier comes with its own set of flippers and obstacles. Tier 1 feels like a typical, small pinball table, except the bumpers are sarcophaguses that spew out monsters when hit too many times. In Tier 2, skeletons parade around a giant woman’s head that slowly morphs into a serpent each time the ball hits a particular hole. And Tier 3 is just a mad spinning circle of monks. In every area, there are conditions to work towards that will open gateways to bonus rounds or grant you extra balls on top of the default three. There’s quite a bit going on in this table, and most of its intricacies will remain a mystery for some time.

The real drive to keep playing, though, is to nab–and keep–the high score slot. Getting a high score in pinball is something to be proud of, after all. But your hard-earned top slot may disappear if you reset the game incorrectly. Resetting by way of the Wii menu will reset everything, and that’s a devastating blow that’s easy to commit on accident. Fortunately, it’s just as easy to reset by holding start and pushing select, which is nice for those times when you got off to a bad start and don’t want to play the other two balls.

Devil’s Crush works best when played with the Wii remote, where the D-pad controls the left flipper and the 2 button the right. There is also a tilt button that helps shake the ball out of a rut, but there are times when not even shaking the table will get things playing again. I experienced a game-breaking scene when the ball kept going back into the same bonus round without hesitation. This ball is most certainly an unpredictable one. It periodically bounces in the least likely direction, shooting off horizontally or sliding unrealistically up the side of the table. Sometimes it doesn’t bounce at all and just wraps around the flipper and plunks into the hole. It seems to fall, all too often, right down the middle where you can’t possibly hit it. Such is the way of pinball, but this one seems a little too eager to give you hell. How fitting.

Final Comments

Devil’s Crush is pinball, and pinball, as I know it, is frustrating and annoying and yet consistently draws me back again and again for higher scores. If you are at all a pinball fan, you’ll enjoy the size and intricacy of this table and put several hours into it before the inevitable final conclusion: there are better, computer-based pinball games out there for free. Granted, six bucks is a small asking price, but you’d only need to download Devil’s Crush on Wii if there will be times when you won’t have access to a PC… or you just really, really love pinball.