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The trick to most of these alternative playfields and modes is that you’ll need to do some grinding to earn enough tickets to unlock them all, and depending on your level of skill that could potentially take a while, at least to get rolling. Starting out with only the standard play style, the original layout, and 2 additional holiday-themed layouts, you’ll need to work to accumulate enough tickets to level up and unlock some things. The special bonus opportunities that show up every few games are definitely your best bet, but earning them can be tricky. Whether your goal is to get more than a certain number of points, get 3 balls into a specific scoring hole, or get a very specific combined score these do a reasonably good job of making you work your core skills. For each game mode there’s also an unlockable special ball that will have bonus properties and look a bit cooler, these are earned by matching a specific objective in 5 different games. My suggestion, if you’re looking to grind as quickly as possible, would be to unlock Speed Ball mode first where you have unlimited balls for 2 minutes… and that will let you accumulate tickets quite a bit quicker with far higher per-game scores. What’s holding it back the most currently, aside from it being a relatively niche experience to begin with, is that Skee-Ball is a very tactile experience and the current control options don’t do a great job of replicating that. The developer has told me that they’re working on a patch to add motion controls, and depending on how they’re implemented this may help greatly. Your best overall option right now is to play the game in handheld mode and use the touchscreen, which does provide a somewhat tactile experience and allows you to be far faster for modes like Speed Ball. Docked you’ll be limited to using the joycons which work well enough but really diminish the experience of it all. I would imagine the hope is that once motion controls have been added it would be possible to get an almost Wii-era feel to the game and that may help things greatly as well as make playing with a friend a bit more exciting. While there’s nothing particularly wrong with Skee-Ball and how its implemented on Switch, it would probably benefit from some tweaking. Right now starting up the game fresh feels like quite a climb to really get into a groove and have more fun. The alternative modes and playfield layouts really add some flavor to things but the initial grinding to get any of it is discouraging. If the tickets required to unlock things were perhaps more progressive, with the price going up for each new unlock rather than all of them beginning with the same static value, it could take the same effort to unlock everything but allow for rewards to people earlier on. Once it is patched with motion controls if they’re implemented fairly well I think the overall experience could also benefit greatly. For now it is more of a novelty that shows promise, but feels a bit pricey and could benefit from some tweaking to meet its potential.
Justin Nation, Score:Fair [6.0]