Comparison

Visual Pinball vs Tower Pinball

Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both games, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.

Head to head
About

Visual Pinball

Enjoy a realistic pinball simulation with hundreds of community-created tables. Experience immersive haptic feedback and customize your gameplay with intuitive settings and controller support. Advanced options are available for power users.

Highlights
  • Hundreds of community-developed tables
  • Haptic feedback for immersive gameplay
  • Customizable settings and POV adjustments
  • Game controller support
  • External DMD and AltColor/AltSound support
  • Touch overlay and instructions
Features
Read full description

Experience the open source pinball simulator now on your iPhone! Features: - Play hundreds of community and hobbyist-developed tables. - Feel the action with haptic feedback for bumpers, targets, and flippers. - Customize your experience with a simple, intuitive interface for settings, table options, and POV adjustments. - Game controller support. - External DMD support for ZeDMD, ZeDMD-WiFi, and Pixelcade devices. - Serum AltColor support. - AltSound support. - Touch overlay shows touch areas. - Step-by-step touch instructions when playing a table. - Advanced options for power users, including script and log file exports. - Support for iOS 18 Game Mode.

About

Tower Pinball

Experience pinball with a unique vertical design where the ball ascends through multiple floors. Each table offers distinct mechanics and challenges, from orbital physics to intricate clockwork. Designed for intuitive two-thumb play, it features realistic machine elements and online leaderboards.

Highlights
  • Multi-floor tower pinball tables
  • Unique physics per floor
  • Intuitive two-thumb controls
  • Realistic pinball machine elements
  • Game Center leaderboards
  • Offline play
Features
Read full description

Pinball where the table is a tower. Every table in Tower Pinball is three floors stacked on top of each other, and the ball climbs them. Play well on the ground floor and a lift carries the ball up; play well again and it goes higher. Drain, and it falls back down the tower to wherever the floor below can catch it. ROCKET RANGE, the first table, is a launch site at sunrise. The pad is fire and steel, the upper atmosphere is thin cold air, and the top floor is orbit — and gravity thins as you climb. The same flipper that barely clears a ramp on the pad will fling the ball across the sky in orbit. Learn the three floors and you learn a machine with three personalities. CLOCKWORK TOWER, the second table, is a clock seen from the inside. The workshop floor is oak boards and a brass movement you wind by hand, the gear train turns a great wheel that carries the ball across the floor, and at the top the dial collects the hours and a bell strikes them. The whole floor leans with the clock's beat and the escapements open on the tick, so the table has a tempo you can learn: many of its shots score double when they land on the tick. MADE FOR TWO THUMBS. There are no tiny buttons. The left half of the screen is the left flipper and the right half is the right one, edge to edge, so you play it the way you hold your phone. Nudge the table with a lean or a two-finger tap. A short tour shows you the tower the first time you open it, and a coach shows you where your hands go. A REAL MACHINE. A dot-matrix display calls the shots, bonuses count down at the end of every ball, modes stack, multiball lands on the top floor, and the neon over the flame trench flickers the way a tired tube does. Skill shots, kickbacks, a lock, a wizard mode — the machinery of a cabinet, on a phone, with haptics you can feel and music you can turn off. Every shot is named on the deck, so the display and the table speak the same words. CLIMB THE BOARD. Every finished game posts to a Game Center leaderboard, and your best score sits on the menu. Rocket Range is complete and free. Clockwork Tower is a one-time purchase in the menu, shareable with your family, with no subscription and no currency, and every table after it will be the same. More tables are coming to the tower: a deep-sea trench and a power grid. No ads. Plays offline. Made for iPhone and iPad, held in two hands.

Screenshots

Visual Pinball3 screens
Tower Pinball4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is rating: Tower Pinball at 5.0 against Visual Pinball's 4.6. Tower Pinball also leads on review sentiment (100% vs 79%). Visual Pinball's advantage is monetization model (free vs freemium) and ratings volume (45 vs 1). On price, ads, in-app purchases and device support there is nothing between them.

Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS

CostPrice · In-app purchases · Ads · Monetization

Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.

ReceptionRating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings

Tower Pinball holds the better App Store score, 5.0 against 4.6. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: Visual Pinball has 45 ratings behind it against 1, so its average is the more settled of the two. Written reviews point the same way: 79% of Visual Pinball's written reviews are positive against 100% of Tower Pinball's.

Scorecard4 real differences · 6 level
Visual Pinball versus Tower Pinball: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterVisual PinballTower Pinball
PriceFreeFree
Rating4.6 (45 ratings)5.0 (1 ratings) — better
Positive reviews78.6% of reviews100.0% of reviews — better
Number of ratings45 — better1
Update frequency—Weekly
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesNoNo
MonetizationFree — betterFreemium
DevicesiPhoneiPhone, iPad — better
Requires iOS18.017.0 — better
Further details — not scored
Size87 MB47 MB
Age rating9+4+
DeveloperJason MillardTim Mueller

Customer experience

Visual Pinball

All ratings45 ratings
Positive91.1%
Neutral2.2%
Negative6.7%
Written reviews56 reviews
Positive78.6%
Neutral12.5%
Negative8.9%

Tower Pinball

All ratings1 ratings
Positive100.0%
Neutral0.0%
Negative0.0%
Written reviews1 reviews
Positive100.0%
Neutral0.0%
Negative0.0%

Bugs and requests

Visual Pinball

Reported bugs

2 issues
  • Tables don't load for some users
  • Certain complex/intensive tables error out or run at low FPS

Requested features

6 requests
  • List of most played tables
  • Ability to reposition DMD
  • Option to skip startup checks for some tables
  • Ability to edit table scripts on the app
  • Direct link to table depository
Show 1 more
  • iPad version with more screen space

Tower Pinball

Not enough reviews yet to summarise bugs or requests.

In-app purchases

None

Visual Pinball

No in-app purchases

None

Tower Pinball

No in-app purchases

Questions

Is Visual Pinball free?
Visual Pinball is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Is Tower Pinball free?
Tower Pinball is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Which has better reviews, Visual Pinball or Tower Pinball?
Tower Pinball is rated higher. Visual Pinball averages 4.6 out of 5 from 45 ratings, while Tower Pinball averages 5.0 from 1 ratings.
Do Visual Pinball or Tower Pinball have ads?
Neither Visual Pinball nor Tower Pinball shows ads.

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