Pinball FX

Pinball FX is Zen Studios' digital pinball platform, and it is the most polished way to play licensed pinball on a PC without spending anything. The base game is free on the Epic Games Store, and three tables stay free for unlimited play: Fish Tales, an officially licensed recreation of a Williams machine, and two of Zen's own original designs, Sorcerer's Lair and Wild West Rampage.

Fish Tales is the draw: the 1992 Williams machine about a fishing trip whose story keeps growing in the telling, recreated under licence. Zen's Williams recreations offer a classic mode that keeps the original rules and a remastered mode that adds animations and effects. Sorcerer's Lair and Wild West Rampage are different: Zen originals designed for the screen, free to do things a physical machine cannot, with toys and characters that move around the playfield.

The physics are Zen's "Pro Physics", tuned table by table, and it plays well with a controller or keyboard. There is local play for up to four people taking turns, leaderboards, and a collection of cosmetic items for a customisable 3D game room.

Zen has been making digital pinball since the original Pinball FX in 2007, and this version is the platform they now build everything on. The library mixes Zen originals with licensed tables based on films, comics and television, and an expanding run of Williams and Bally recreations, so the free tables are a fair sample of both halves of what Zen does. The visuals are the most elaborate of any pinball game on PC, with 4K, HDR and ray-tracing options on a capable GPU, and the 16 GB of RAM it asks for even at minimum settings reflects that. It also has achievements and cloud saves on Epic, and table-specific leaderboards and challenges that give a free table more to chase than a high score.

The honest catches. This is a storefront as much as a game. More than 80 other tables are paid add-ons, the menus advertise them constantly, and the free tables are meant partly as a sample. You need an Epic Games account and the Epic launcher, it runs only on Windows, and the install is large at around 42 GB. PlayBound does not install it directly: we open it in the Epic Games Launcher (or its store page, if you do not have Epic yet), and you point PlayBound at the game once Epic has installed it.

For PlayBound it earns its place because those three free tables are genuinely free and genuinely good, and one of them is a licensed real machine you would otherwise have to buy.