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2 months ago
Feature: A pinball-platforming palate cleanser
There's an easy grace available to you in Yoku's Island Express. Steer the main character onto any of the pinball flippers embedded in the floors and walls and you can punt him into the air as predictably as a jump in any other platformer. Use those paddles to aim Yoku into one of the other pinball-inspired mechanisms, however, and the game takes hold, shooping Yoku…
Update: This demo was actually released on PC in early July, but only came to my attention when publishers Team17 made an announcement around the demo's launch on more consoles today. Shame on me. Still! If I missed it back then, maybe you did too? Apparently done with our Graham's long-running promise to review Yoku's Island Express, developers Villa Gorilla today released a free demo…
3 months ago
Feature: A pinball platformer
It wasn’t as if the tester was having a bad time. He was a pinball fan, after all. It’s just that every time he tried to reach for his coffee, the intensity of the game he was testing kept pulling his hand back to the controller. Half an hour later, he finished playing, picked up his cold coffee, and said he’d enjoyed the game. As…
Feature: The endless march of time
We're just about halfway through 2018 (which has somehow taken both too long and no time at all). As is tradition, we've shaken our our brains around to see which games from the last six months still make our neurons fizzle with delight. Then we wrote about them here, in this big list feature that you're reading right now this second. And what games they…
5 months ago
Feature: Flipping out
Video: Yoku’s Island Express is a bit Metroid, a bit pinball and a bit good
The pinball platformer is an idea developers like to feed quarters into every so often. If a character is round (Pac-Man, Kirby) or can bunch up into a ball (Sonic, Samus, enslaved Pokémon), then they’ve probably been bashed about by flippers at some point. But these games tend to be reskins of traditional pinball; few reflect their source material. Yoku’s Island Express doesn’t have a…
2 years ago
The title might remind you of famous baby-tending egg monster Yoshi, but Yoku's Island Express [official site] has more in common with a certain Sega spin-off than anything from the Nintendo stable. This is a game for all of us who wish Sonic Spinball had spawned a thousand imitators, though the trailer shows a much more expansive platform game with pinball elements rather than Spinball's…
