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Zen Studios has slowly put together a tidy resume of being the premier developer of pinball games on the current generation of consoles.  First was Pinball FX on the Xbox Live Arcade, which became a fan favorite of gamers on the Xbox 360.  Then came Zen Pinball on the PS3, cementing Zen Studios status as a developer of solid, physics based pinball titles.  Not content with sitting on their laurels, Zen Studios has put together a new pinball title for the Xbox Live Arcade, but instead of just taking the normal route of packaging tables and a new engine, they have turned the tables on the way you purchase a pinball title.  Pinball FX 2 has become the next step for Zen Studios and it is a great pinball title, but your mileage will depend on how you enjoy the new strategy for their new distribution model.

Pinball FX2 at its heart is an engine first and foremost.  It is free for anyone that wishes to download the title into their Xbox Live Arcade library.  You read that correctly.  The front end for the game is completely free of charge for anyone that wants to grab it.  See, instead of paying for a game that comes with some tables that you might like, and others that you may hate, you now get the front end for no charge and then add the tables that you want.  It is an interesting strategy to say the least, and it does eliminate things like tables that are received poorly, like the Extreme table, which I absolutely hated playing in the first game, because it was a poorly designed table.  As an added bonus for those that loved the first game, if you own it, all of those tables will import into the second title free of charge.

While some will either love or hate the new strategy, there are a lot of new tweaks to the new engine that sell Pinball FX 2 on its own merits.  Most of these new features come in the form of community integration.  As we have seen with titles like Geometry Wars 2, you now have a full integration of your friends into your experience.  Every table has leaderboards both based on the community as a whole, as well as with your friends.  As you play, little status updates will pop up, telling you how many points you need to beat the next person in your friends list, and you will also be notified when you actually beat your friends.  These notices will continue until you reach the top of your friends list in scores.  It is a great approach to community gaming and a driving factor in getting you to keep playing the game.  I spend several hours trying to get to the top of my friends list, taunted by the scores that several of my friends had posted.  More games really need to take the Xbox Live community features and integrate them like Pinball FX 2 has done, as it adds more competition to your game and more importantly, keeping you playing the game.

I also like the idea of creating a new Superscore which can be used to compare your placement against other players on both your friends list, as well as against the community as a whole.  See, the first game did not offer a good way to compare your score against others in the leaderboards.  Now, Zen Studios has created a Superscore where it takes your cumulative total across all the tables and reduces it to millions number.  For instance, my combined score is 30,000,000, so my Superscore is 30.  The number ends up being something simple to compare across users and allots for all of your play, and not just a high score from one table.  Also in play is your Pinball Wizard score, which takes the Superscore of all the players in your friends list and then multiplies it by the number of tables you have installed.  The more tables you own and the higher your friends’ scores, the better your Pinball Wizard score becomes.

Multiplayer has also been upped nicely, with split screen for those playing locally as well as full integration for Xbox Live.  Now you can play with friends online and if you have an Xbox 360 Vision camera (and I assume it will work with the Kinect camera as well) you can taunt your friends while you are playing against them.  The online play is very smooth, and it works really well when it comes to syncing up the action.

The new tables that are available at launch are good tables, with a lot more happening on the screen at any one time.   The four tables at launch include Pasha (Persian themed), Biolab (monster laboratory), Rome (based in Rome) and finally, Secrets of the Deep (underwater themed).  Secrets of the Deep easily became my favorite out of the new tables, but each have been well designed and offer so many new ways to score points and interact.  A couple of the tables even have a second, mini-table under the main table that you can enter to play a little pinball based mini-game.  There is not a dud in the bunch, which could not be said of the first Pinball FX title. 

Pinball FX 2 is a solid pinball game, with great physics, tons of new achievements and more importantly, a platform that can be built and tailored to your playing style.  I am sure there will be a few that hate this new distribution style, but the game plays so well, and the new tables are so much fun to play that it should hardly be a concern.  Mix in that all of your old tables will be imported with new physics and you have a top notch platform on the Xbox Live Arcade for all your pinball needs.  Pinball FX 2 gets 5 out of 5 Aeropausonauts.

Check out Pinball FX 2 and other XBLA reviews at Test Freaks.