Free-to-play newcomer Pinball FX offers a nice Gamerscore kickback

Pinball FX rolls onto Xbox today as a free-to-play reboot of Zen Studios' popular series, and there are some dead easy achievements up for grabs for free... as well as some that seem like they could take some doing.

If you take a look at the best free Xbox games, you'll probably notice that easy completions are few and far between. While the same is true of this new version of Pinball FX, more than half of the Pinball FX achievements can be unlocked very easily and fairly quickly, although the remaining few and therefore the completion may take a fair while longer and be considerably more skill-based.

Pinball FX achievements: mostly easy, the rest... not so much

Pinball FX gives you one table — Wild West Rampage — for free, with the option to buy more for your collection (no, previous DLC purchases do not carry over to this version, sadly) or get access to all bar a few for a time with the paid Pinball Pass. Wild West Rampage isn't the easiest of tables to master, it must be said, but if you want achievements here without reaching for the coin slot, that's all you'll have. The first few achievements are completely free: playing one game, customising your profile, and setting up a tournament will get you three very easily, then grabbing a collectible (requires around 8 million points cumulative on Wild West Rampage) and playing a table in all eight game modes will get you another two pretty easy ones, and that's half the list done.

Next up, you'll want to unlock a Table Award, the replacement for table-specific achievements, which won't be making a comeback here. "There are certain platforms where you can have a limited number of achievements," Zen's marketing director Ákos Györkei told our buddies over at TrueTrophies when asked why there wouldn't be any Pinball FX DLC trophies or achievements this time. "With this much DLC, we are stretching these limits." Still, for the Table Award on Wild West Rampage, you need to win a quick-draw duel. You initiate this by hitting the badge spinner in the top-left of the table a few times, then dumping the ball into the bottom-left locker once the 'duel' lamp comes on. Then, you need to quickly hit either of the lit lanes (you only have a few seconds), which will see a magnet catch your ball as it reaches the flippers and a target pop up on the opposite side of the table, so just hit it for a big score bonus and the award (and achievement). Events have just gone live too, so you can jump into one of those for another easy achievement — they're table-specific, but there's one for Wild West Rampage running for the next two weeks, and you can join the other one-point reward ones at the top of the Events page just by downloading the trial versions of those two tables (Rome and Champion Pub this week), too.

The only other achievement it's realistically possible to unlock right now will be a bit of a slog with just the one fairly difficult table, as it requires racking up a lifetime score across all sessions and tables of over a billion points. If you have the pass or purchase some other tables, there are some tables that could make this much easier. Attack From Mars has such crazy score values that you could do it in one game, although unfortunately, demo scores don't count towards the billion banked. You can check how many points are needed for the first unlockable for any given table on the right side of the select screen to get a rough idea of how high-scoring each is — anything significantly higher than Wild West Rampage's 8-million target will probably get you to the billion a good bit faster.

The last two will take a bit more work again... Shiny Memento asks us to "Earn a Gold or Diamond Event Cup," seemingly a reward for placing well in any given tournament, which will almost certainly be rough going — we'll see how that shakes out when the first ones end in a week's time. Finally, there's the 'simple' task of unlocking everything in a Season. "A Season usually lasts for three months. If you play the Events inside the Season, you can unlock the rewards fast, but a more casual player should be able to get them without too much of a strain," Györkei explains. To get all 15 bonuses this Season (it's a free reward track for all players), you'll need to rack up a hefty 466 Season Points in the next 90 days or so.

Events pay out these points if you can meet the score requirements on the right side of the screen — free players will only have the top three Events (again, you can download trials of tables you don't own to participate in those ones), which award one point per success, and yes, you seem to be able to receive as many points as you have attempts per day so long as you play well enough. Owners of the tables featured in the premium Events can also jump into those for double rewards to speed things along, but trials won't work for those ones. At the moment, free players have ten Season Points per day up for grabs from Rome and Champion Pub, while it seems like there's no cap on how many can be earned from the unlimited entry Wild West Rampage Event. In theory, this means you could grind out hundreds of points just by hitting around 1.3 million (dead easy, especially once you have the Skillshot down... around 11 o'clock on the pressure gauge should do it) then intentionally losing any remaining balls to get the achievement done regardless of daily restrictions... the paid Addams Family table would get the job done in half the time if you're interested in grabbing that, which we saw a few people in the achievement reveal thread say they were!

So there we have it — 450G for free, an extra 150G for amassing a billion points (Event games and trials don't count towards this, by the way), 200G for grinding out the seasonal rewards, then the last 200G and full completion if you're good enough to get Gold or Diamond in an Event. Will you be sticking this one on your tag? Let us know!

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Written by Luke Albigés

Luke runs the TA news team, contributing where he can primarily with reviews and other long-form features — crafts he has honed across two decades of print and online gaming media experience, having worked with the likes of gamesTM, Eurogamer, Play, Retro Gamer, Edge, and many more. He loves all things Monster Hunter, enjoys a good D&D session, and has played way too much Destiny.