Shovelware. Decent engine, bland and boring everything-else.
The basic engine here is quite good - and suspiciously similar to the engine of the free Future Pinball framework, which has been around since at least 2006 if not even earlier. Regardless of whether or not this is a completely-original engine or not, it's definitely better than the Pinball Gold engine, and on par with the engine found in the Pro Pinball series.
No licensed tables here of course, just six brand-new tables. The trouble here is that each of the tables feels depressingly similar, as if the developers created just one basic playfield and copy-pasted it over and over again with new background graphics and slightly altered lanes. Each table has a bonanza of flippers, each table announces "combo!", and each table follows the same basic pattern - shoot ramps, get "combo!"s, eventually trigger a timed mode, complete all timed modes for jackpot. It's competent, thanks to the excellent game engine, but hardly what I would call "thrilling". Pro Pinball, despite the clunky, oftentimes-frustrating physics and oftentimes-even-more-frustrating lane layouts, offers ten times the excitement of this game, despite being over fifteen years older.
The production values here are just absolutely atrocious, too. Generic fonts, unimaginative displays, terrible soft-jazz music permeating each of the six tables (even the supposedly-heavy metal Two Worlds table), and the voice actors show even less excitement than the Female Computer Voice in your average science fiction movie. The action is "spruced up" with - you guessed it - generic, bland-sounding sound samples to fit the table's theme (jungle noises for the dino table, planes going WOOSH WOOSH for the helicopter table, and so on). The table art is bland too - a good pinball table makes it obvious which ramps you want to shoot and why. Here, all sense of direction is lost in a sea of pastels and cheesy renders. It really feels like one of those bad budget titles you'd find from Strategy First, or in the $2.99 bin at Fry's or MicroCenter.
The one good thing I can say about the table design is that the shots are generally simple enough to make - nowhere near as frustratingly impossible as some of the tables on the Pinball Gold pack. I have nothing against difficult, old-school tables, but the tables here in Dream Pinball hover in that uncanny valley - too modern to be a simple test of reaction time and skill like the old tables, and far too sedate and boring to pass as modern-day tables.
You could do a lot worse for $5.99, but you could also do a lot better. Pinball freaks who already have the Pro Pinball series here on GoG should probably set up an installation of Visual Pinball and Future Pinball - they may take a bit of effort to get set up, but they're free, and there are plenty of hardcore pinball fans who meticulously recreate actual classic tables right down to every last detail. Visual Pinball features a much wider selection of tables, and Future Pinball features a 3D engine - an engine that, like I said before, is suspiciously similar to Dream Pinball's, and which has been around since years before Dream Pinball 3D was ever shoveled out the door.
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