A few things.
• A completely unique layout again, and difficult to find major similarity to either Balcer's previous work or that of other designers. Pretty refreshing in the era of recycled or very samey Borg / Gomez / Ritchie machines at Stern.
• The art could be better, but it looks reasonable and theme applicable overall. However ....
• I think they really need to make some of the playfield art less 'noisy', and clean it up a bit.
**The grass** in the middle of the playfield is the biggest culprit, in my view. It's way too heavily textured and creates far too much visual noise, which detracts from all the mode inserts and other art, and makes them much less distinct. It would look immeasurably better either as a uniform colour or without such a sharp texture. The texture itself doesn't look too pretty either and looks like it might be from a pack of stock textures.
They may want grass, but having something more or less uniform in colour with perhaps slight tonal curves would make the playfield look far, far better. Green suggests grass, and they can still have grass on the LCD, so people would realise what the green colour is. What they have there currently is white (green) noise.
• Display seems very static, but I'm sure they're on that and will improve.
• As others have pointed out, the metal / hard rock guitar riff really doesn't suit the theme and is pretty grating and completely generic. The more Bavarian style music in the game that we heard so far is far more theme applicable and is fun and jolly and what you'd expect of the machine.
• The main bartender's voice ... he sounds half Irish and half Swedish. Maybe he is German, but he certainly doesn't sound like it ... he also doesn't sound anything like the caricature ... he sounds young. You'd imagine from the character it'd be an older, raspier, deeper and much more German voice.
Some of the other voicing sounds alright. But most of it really doesn't sound German at all. In fact, I'm not sure I heard any German vocabulary or callouts .. which seems a bit strange. Make it German!
• Still don't think the company logo on the side of the cabinet looks great. If you want to put something there, do a condensed form of the logo. An AP graphic of some sort. It seems unnecessary, and I can't think of a single other modern game with a big manufacturer logo on the decals. But maybe this is just for promotional purposes at launch.
• Last advice would be to try to keep it the same price as Houdini. If not, then don't take it above $7200. The better the value proposition, the more you'll sell, and particularly for pubs, bars and breweries (who'd normally be looking at far cheaper fruit machines in Europe / Australia which tend to take up less space and earn more).
Overall I think it's really positive, and looks great fun to shoot. For me, just a little bit of extra polish or a few changes would really make it look and sound a lot better.
Elizabethtown, KY
Biscarrosse
London
