I'm a fan of platformers and some of my favorite games are games that we don't see made all that frequently anymore... pinball games. So who woulda thunk that someone would come along and mix the two of these genre's together and somehow make it not just playable, but make it one of the most exciting and fun games that I have played in quite some time?
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The story is that you are a new mail carrier on an island and for some reason you have a pinball attached to you that enables you to move around the island. Don't get too wrapped up in this, the story isn't really all that important but the fact that this game is extremely fun and easy to play is all that really matters.
You can move from side to side but because of the ball attacked to you you can not move up or down. For the most part and the only way that you can get around is to find these bumpers or push pads that can get you up to the next portion of the screen and around the island all of which is done in a vertical and side-to-side fashion.
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Then there are certain segments that you must burst a certain number of pods in order to break on through to the other side and unlock certain new portions of the map.
At first travel can be a bit tedious, especially if you grow a bit tired of the 15 or so different pinball sections that exist but eventually a very effective form of fast traveling from one portion of the island to the next gets opened up for you and this speeds things along very quickly.
There are also bosses, which is something that I would never even imagine possible in a pinball game, or how the mechanics of it would work but somehow it simply just does work.
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The reason why I stumbled upon this game was because a friend of mine had just acquired a TurboGrafx mini and one of the games that came with it was Devil's Crush and it reminded me how much fun pinball games actually can be on a big screen. I feel as though Yoku's Island Express has greatly improved upon the classic pinball design in that it is more like a quest and you actually can defeat it. Even once you are done with it, it actually had a lot of replay value because pinball always stays a bit fun
This game costs next to nothing these days because it is several years old. I believe the game is fun for people of all ages and is honestly some of the most fun I have had in a while. It comes highly recommended.