Appulse Preview – Blending pinball with a roguelite shooter

If you’ve ever been playing pinball and thought “You know what this needs? Guns and shooting things” then Appulse is the game for you. It blends together that familiar top-down view of a pinball table, replete with flippers and things to bounce your ball off to earn points, and then adds guns, waves of enemies, bosses and roguelite run progression into the mix.

For as beloved a pastime as pinball is, it’s strange to think that it’s not really fed into video games beyond, of course, digital pinball games and variations on pachinko. There was the charming pinball platformer Yoku’s Island Express almost a decade ago – and you could say there’s a bit of pinball to 2D Sonic as well – but other genre mashups are few and far between.

Getting to grips with Appulse reminds me why that might be. Pinball is very much its own thing, and I’m honestly not that great at timing my flippers to hit a desired target or avoid the ball lazily arcing down that gap that’s just out of my reach. But Appulse blends this with the a twin-stick shooter aesthetic, giving your ricocheting craft weapons to blast enemies with, while also affecting your momentum through the stage.

For the pinballing aspects, you can use this as a kind of aftertouch, using shotgun blasts or bursts of rapid fire to nudge you towards the specific pads and bumpers, the special score channels on the pinball table to achieve various conditions and advance your high score charge. It feels almost counter-intuitive, like playing with inverted Y-axis controls, while figuring how and when to work with and against the natural gravity pulling you back down towards the bottom of the table.

Another thing to factor in is that you only have so many bullets in a clip, and you need to ping your craft with a flipper in order to reload, meaning you still have that natural cycle of a pinball game, returning to the flippers every few moments to reload and launch yourself again.

Add to this the waves of enemies that appear, stomping across the table towards a central power unit, forcing you to prioritise taking them out before they do too much damage. Luckily, it’s not just your weapon that can deal damage, and barrelling through them with your ball craft will destroy or damage them too. It builds up to the appearance of table-dominating bosses, a giant robotic spider dropping down into the board with a chunky health bar that you need to whittle away, while it drops timed explosive barrels and pulls other attacks that you need to avoid.

Where things can get especially satisfying is when you start to apply the run-based modifiers, earning boosters that can massively change the way that you play. I had a build that completely flipped the scripts by reversing the recoil momentum from my SMG, making me speed up in the direction of fire instead of being pushed back. Boosting that further with larger magazines meant I could almost laser target where I wanted to go and zoom towards enemies I needed to hit, while adding the ability to shoot points barrels as well as hit them ramped up my scoring potential. There’s a reason why roguelites can be so compelling, and this kind of game-changing build shows the potential within Appulse.

Fundamentally, Appulse is still going to be playing to a pinball-loving crowd. If you don’t like flipping a ball around a table, then the underlying appeal might be missing for you here, but if you have even a passing interest, the layered on shooting, momentum and run-based progression can add a lot of variety and spice up the ball-pinging action.

Appulse is coming out on 26th November, but a freshly updated demo is now available on Steam to check out.

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