The Coin Game – PS5 Review

From developer devotid and publisher Kwalee Gaming comes The Coin Game. The title tells you nothing, but what it is, in effect, is a compendium of all manner of ticket and carnival games in the grand US style. Think of any bowling alley where you can win tickets and exchange them for all manner of worthless tat. Though we actually got a decent Pac-Man mug when we were at Butlins Bognor Regis once.

The games on offer are pretty diverse and representative of a wide spectrum of the machines, from the coin shovers that UK players will be familiar with from any number of dismal seaside arcades or the risible daytime ITV quiz show Tipping Point with Ben Shephard, to skeeball or basketball booths.

Across five distinct venues you’ll encounter a wide spectrum of amusements from the basic coin-ops we mentioned, to dodgems, minigolf and fairground rides that are usually the preserve of travelling funfairs, in the UK at least. And just like in real life, some are fun whereas others are dull.

At the outset you’re able to choose between Birthday, Survival or Quickplay modes. The first option is, in effect, freeplay. The conceit is your uncle has paid for arcade hire for you, this gives you free reign to knock yourself out at any of the arcades on Islandville with free travel between them via limo. It saves having to run about or travel on the bus with paupers.

Survival mode is where you have to pay your own way by doing odd jobs such as babysitting, mowing lawns or doing a paper round. This is all well and good, but if you’re cycling around the place, the minimap isn’t visible. This makes for tough sledding, especially if you’re trying to do the paper deliveries. Another way to make coin is via pizza delivery, we managed to do this on foot as the delivery times are generous enough that you can run in the correct direction and still get the job done.

We don’t doubt that the devs intended for you to spend most of your time in Survival mode as there’s trophies for X number of days passing in game. Who are we kidding though, we’ve spent most of our time in Birthday mode as it’s the best way to suck it and see when it comes to finding the most fun machines to play.

Once you run out of cash, you can go into a shower cubicle that blows money up in the air, a bit like the (anti)climactic final game of The Crystal Maze, just without the bald fella off The Rocky Horror Show haranguing you while you grab all you can.

Like any amusements, there’s good games and bad. The good are engaging with a low downtime between replays with the bad having uninspiring mechanics or minimal chance of winning. Some games are the equivalent of the dusty neglected machine in the corner, but in the real world would be taken out of commission for sheer lack of revenue. Then you’ve decent facsimiles of Space Invaders for example. No Pac-Man, but that’s probably a good thing from our point of view.

Our sweetspot for fun and profit was the hockey puck shover, though the ultimate efficiency vs downtime game we found is, and remains, Ticket Toboggan. Once you’re dialled in on that, you can jackpot pretty much every single attempt and bag tons of tickets from one sitting. Almost as soon as your attempt finishes, you’ll be on it again. No doubt in real life, such a machine would have the difficulty tweaked so you’d never win.

The fairground rides, though well intentioned aren’t all that enthralling, but the first-person view that you encounter them with is fun enough. The trophy for doing a hundred rides is no doubt going to be a grind, especially since you can’t stack multiple credits on a ride and spend the duration on there.

The go kart ride is quite fun though, but the plodding AI drivers are the biggest obstacle you’ll face. Thankfully the criteria for getting a podium place isn’t too strict, but it still took us a few races to get a decent rhythm down. Dodgems are also fun with the biggest knocks dislodging cash from the NPCs who are also riding around.

Minigolf is included, but the implementation feels like an afterthought. Ball control is rudimentary at best, but thankfully the focus is on fun rather than finishing under par. The biggest issue is when you’ve taken a shot, the aiming reticule doesn’t face directly towards the hole. It’s also a bit too easy to go out of bounds, but as we said, the score is less of an issue.

Once you get to the carnival, there’s all manner of shooting galleries and prize booths to play, most are forgiving enough, but the hundred shots to destroy the red star target is harsher than most. It’s the best way to snag one particular high ticket value prize though, so it’s definitely worth persevering. Or in our case, getting up close to the screen and squinting to make sure we’ve done a thorough job. No zoom you see? This is despite our holding the left trigger in the manner accustomed to due to countless FPS campaigns.

As well as all manner of ticket redemption machines, there’s UFO catchers, fruit machines, scratchcards and bingo to play across other venues besides just the five conventional venues. The bingo is just for a line, but quite fun as you have to manually dab and call if you win. Just like at a real-life bingo hall, only without chicken in a basket or link games that someone in fabled places like Rotherham or Cleethorpes invariably wins when you’ve got loads of numbers left. Or have been sat on one for ages. It’s fair to say that Islandville has you covered for games of chance.

In the event you’ve filled up your inventory with tat, you can even visit the pawnshop to exchange for money, it’s called recycling but we don’t know about you, the average item you get for ticket redemption is generally destined for landfill. It’s very much essential if you’re rawdogging it playing Survival mode, but you can readily discard items without worry in Birthday mode.

If we’ve any complaints, the hub world feels a bit thrown together. Yes, we get it from the point of view of the survival mode, but the immersion is broken a little by the fact that all the NPCs here are like Weebl type toys. This isn’t really explained in game, but we suspect it’s something from the original PC port. There’s probably some deep lore here like the bafflingly successful Five Nights at Freddys series, but it’s passed us by. And the only vaguely sinister animatronics are those that play guitar in Larry’s Arcade in the Chuck ‘E’ Cheese tradition. Though we only know about that ‘cause of Nolan Bushnell putting all his Atari money into it.

The fast travel aspect in Birthday mode renders the travel between locations redundant, but in the event you choose to use the golf cart or bicycle to do so, you’ll be rear-ended by an NPC driver. This isn’t an issue in Birthday, but in Survival, you take damage. It’s a weird thing and we suspect it’ll derail a playthrough through no real fault of your own.

In conclusion, The Coin Game is a canny compendium of many fairground and ticket dispensing machines that we’d recommend you play instead of pumping cash into the actual machines at your local bowling alley. At least the tat you get here is entirely virtual and not more worthless landfill. It’s good too, though we’re not sure we’re going to ride the fairground rides as frequently as we will the shooting galleries.