The Coin Game Review

The Most Over-Ambitious of all Arcade Sims

No matter what I think about The Coin Game as an experience, I have supreme respect for what it represents as an achievement. It blows my mind that it was created by one person. I keep thinking that I have reached the outer limits of what has been created, and then I’ll stumble on more. I re-evaluated what The Coin Game actually was, three times over. 

The Coin Game dumps you into its Birthday Mode at first. I’m still weighing up whether that’s the best way to be introduced to it. Birthday Mode makes The Coin Game feel something like Arcade Paradise, so if you enjoyed that game, you might feel comfortable here. You’re handed $300, Larry’s Arcade to tinker around in, and plenty of machines to pump coins into.

Bring Your Bucket of 2ps

Unlike Arcade Paradise, these machines are less coin-op video games (although there are a couple of those, more on that later) and more ticket machines. I grew up by the seaside, so I had some context: we’re talking about the 2p and 10p pusher machines, claw machines, pachinko and ‘cut the thread’ machines. It’s the amusements that aim for equal parts skill and luck, with the output being reels and reels of yellow tickets. 

The aim of these machines is not to make your money back (but, again, that is kind of possible), and more to stumble on a meta of which machine generates the most tickets per $. With the tickets, you can walk up to the counter and purchase an array of toys (and not a couple of packs of Maoam, which is normally what my kids can afford after spending £20 or so). Plus there are other things to aim for, like collectible cards, jackpots on individual games and more. 

I rinsed Larry’s Arcade, and assumed that was it. But then I stepped outside, which is when the size of the operation became clear. Larry’s Arcade isn’t the only arcade. This is an entire bay, and the bay has a few other arcades, all with their own machines. They are separated by vast open spaces that you can traverse with bikes, buses and golf carts. On the way, you’ll spot fairgrounds, pawn shops, malls and pizza parlours.

An Open World, Buried in the Main Menu

I didn’t understand fully what was going on here until I tried out Survival Mode. It’s the beating heart of The Coin Game, and probably should be the mode that it leads with. But it’s also astonishingly, overwhelmingly unhelpful, and leaves you to largely fend for yourself as you watch various survival-bars crash to the floor.

Explaining the Survival Mode doesn’t really do it service. The Coin Game is barely a ticket-machine simulator anymore. You wake up in your home, head out and try to earn some cash. Babysitting jobs, pizza delivery and newspaper rounds are your most local destination (or scratch cards, if you’re feeling lucky), and you’ll start to accumulate some dough. That dough needs to be spent on some short-term stuff, like food and drink, but you can begin to invest it at the game’s ATMs so that you can rent one of the arcades. It doesn’t take too much cash to open Larry’s Arcade, say, but it’s a commitment. 

Now, you’re getting daily stipends of cash from the arcade, as well as being able to play the machines yourself. This is where your experience from Birthday Mode might come in handy. You can beeline to the game that generates the most cash/tickets, and farm them for items to dump into the pawn shop, or outright cash. We tended to rinse a particular coin-pusher that had rolls of green bills inside. 

I’d like to say it again: this is a one-developer project. These are Star Citizen-levels of folly. Devotid looked at their open-world, almost fifty different ticket machines, and then thought “maybe I should include an 18-hole crazy golf course”. Every corner, there is something new and ridiculous. There are video game machines, ferris wheels and hook-a-ducks.

The risk, of course, was that making so much stuff as a single developer was going to be ‘stretched like butter over too much bread’, as the old Lord of the Rings quote goes. And by golly is that true here. Because as much as I admire the wealth of stuff that is packed into The Coin Game, I very rarely enjoyed it. This is a giant galleon of a game, held together by sticky-back plastic and a couple of staples.

A Pachinko in its Armour

The Coin Game is a usability graveyard. Performing even the most simple actions is incredibly difficult, and it can be hard to determine whether the inability to do something is a bug or a feature. 

When playing a machine, I would often lose my cursor on an invisible global highscore table. I’d press a button to activate a claw, only to find that I had accidentally sent a Friend Request to the top player on the highscores. I can only imagine how many that top player is getting per day. 

There are about four different ways to shut down a menu or interface, but it changes per interface. Jobs are onerous and horrible, as you have to manually do things like slot newspapers into mailboxes with a physics engine that is out to stop you (why is there no single contextual button press?). I’ve spent five minutes trying to put a TV dinner in a microwave. I’ve infinitely fallen through floors after a round of crazy golf. 

These are just examples of bugs and mishaps off the top of my head, but there are countless more. And if you’re not wrestling with controls, invisible menus, slow gameplay and performance issues, you’re trying to work out what the hell you’re meant to be doing. We’ve made the game seem palatable and understandable, but none of what we mentioned was contained in an adequate tutorial. You have to discover them yourself, which – I do appreciate – is a plus to some people. It reminds me of Wobbly Life, and how that was devoid of handholding, yet gave you an entire survival game plus open world layered with minigames.

I’d Need a Few More Coins to Play it Again

But combine the inadequate onboarding with relentless bugs and usability quirks, and you get a very impatient reviewer. I (eventually) knew what The Coin Game’s Survival Mode was doing, and I struggled to find enjoyment in doing it. Grinding out jobs with inadequate controls, only to unlock machines with more inadequate controls wasn’t doing it for me. It positioned The Coin Game dangerously close to the rage game genre. 

I can appreciate how much of an achievement The Coin Game is. It’s bigger than a lot of AAA games, yet it’s the work of a single developer. Hop into the Birthday Mode, and you will find pretty much every amusement machine that you’ve ever encountered, lovingly recreated. It’s a slightly greyer, buggier Arcade Paradise.

But there’s biting off more than you can chew, and then there’s swallowing it whole like a python. The Coin Game is TOO big. There’s too much here, held together by poor console controls, bugs, slow performance and rickety survival systems. Players who love shonky survival games and the rage genre will find plenty to grapple with here, but I bounced off it like a coin in a pachinko machine.

Important Links

There’s A Full Arcade Island To Explore In The Coin Game On Xbox, PlayStation, PC – https://www.thexboxhub.com/theres-a-full-arcade-island-to-explore-in-the-coin-game-on-xbox-playstation-pc/

Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/the-coin-game/9nsrps6k7bgf