There’s already been one Marvel table coinciding with a blockbuster film this year and now it’s time for another. Zen Studios have been able to transfer Ant-Man from the big screen to the Pinball FX2 catalogue of tables. Can this microscopic superhero steal the show in a pinball world already overflowing in the Marvel department? Is there anything Ant-Man can bring to the table that others haven’t so far?
In this Ant-Man table you’ll get to experience action from the Marvel Studios film, such as going toe to toe with Yellowjacket and Scott Lang being put through training with Hope Van Dyne. They’ve also managed to integrate voiceovers from the cast of the film in order to make it as authentic as possible.
The layout of the table makes it feel like quite a long one, with all the ramps and lanes to shoot the ball up being a fair distance from the main flippers. This is always a bonus due to having more time to react as the ball comes back towards you. There’s also an additional flipper on the upper left which comes in handy when you’re looking to chain a few decent combo shots together; as always a good combo makes for more points.
This is all well and good but so far there’s nothing extraordinary to set it apart from the rest… and that’s where the particle ball comes in. If you hit the giant particle ball enough times against the targets behind it, it’ll eventually shrink to the size of a regular ball and become a part of the play as a multiball feature. I don’t remember seeing anything like this in other tables and it’s a cool nod to the scientific nature of Ant-Man.
Saving a ball from disappearing down the drain has never required such an odd task to perform as it does when you activate the Cassie save feature. You’ll almost definitely fail at your first chance to save a ball this way, which needs you to lean the area side to side in a motion that pulls the ball back up to safety.
As strange as the feature that sees you collecting different variations of ants, I found the mini-game to be far more intriguing. It’s only a simple one that takes you underneath the table but the idea is to rotate two steel girder looking batons to keep the ball bouncing around for as long as you can. And that’s not the end of Ant-Man’s nifty additions to the pinball world because there’s a pop-up jump ramp that can appear and be used to lock balls into a containment pod.
I genuinely feared for Ant-Man getting his own table, mainly due to most people having little to no knowledge of the character, however just like the film from which this table has been based on, it looks to have been a huge success. They’ve definitely captured Ant-Man specific ideas perfectly and managed to bring in quite a few new things to help this table stand out amongst the crowd. It’s not the easiest table to trigger all the modes on but that’s a good thing as it offers a challenge that so far hasn’t become boring in the slightest.
If I was to criticise one area of the Ant-Man table it’d be that it could do with more features but that doesn’t take the greatness of the ideas that are present. Should you not know who Ant-Man is, don’t let that put you off giving this a go. Regardless of the character, it’s a very good table that only becomes greater when you’re familiar with tiny hero!
