Kingpin guide - How to bowl like a champ in this unique runner
Kingpin Bowling is the a neat arcade runner where you control a bowling ball as you try to hit pins and avoid obstacles to net a high score. Although its gameplay is largely pretty similar to a lot of other runners out there, there are some things about it that make it uniquely challenging. This guide can help you navigate these things though and help make sure you’re a top bowler.
Pin types
Most endless runners want you to go as far as possible to score big, but that’s not quite the case with Kingpin. This game is all about hitting pins, and it couldn’t care less how far you actually roll. If you miss three pins or hit an obstacle, your run is over, and your final score is determined by the pins you hit.
For the most part, each pin is worth one point, but not all pins in Kingpin are created equal. Pins with blue stripes are worth two points each, and pins with golden heads give you five coins when you hit them. Make sure that if you’re going to miss a pin, it’s not one of these special types, as they are much more valuable than the regular, red striped pins.
No, you can’t go through the donuts
As you roll along in Kingpin, there are quite a few obstacles that can stand in your way, and none of these are as deceptive as the giant donuts you come across. This is mainly because these donuts have holes that look like your ball could squeeze through them. As much as you may want to try, your ball definitely cannot fit through the donut holes, so make sure you just swipe to move your ball around them instead of trying to go through them.
How to activate Strike Mode
There are times when Kingpin transforms from a bowling lane full of hazards into a rainbow-colored lane full of coins and yellow-topped pins. This is what happens when you enter Strike Mode, which is something you can activate at various points on a run of Kingpin, although it’s not entirely clear how to activate it at first.
The only thing you really need to know about Strike Mode is that it’s triggered by hitting ten pins in rapid succession. There are a few, subtle audio cues that hint that you’ve started the activation process, but there’s no real feedback about what the timing window is on hitting your ten pins to activate the mode. So, if you just see your lane full of mostly pins, that usually means you can trigger Strike Mode, provided you can hit ten pins in time.
How to get more balls
The primary measure of success in Kingpin is your high score, but the game also allows player to unlock new balls to keep you working toward something besides just climbing the leaderboards. These balls are unlocked one by one each time you earn a total of 500 coins.
Once you’ve earned the requisite amount of coins, you’ll unlock a ball at random and have to earn another 500 coins to get yet another one. This makes things like activating Strike Mode and hitting the gold topped pins really important if you want to complete your collection of balls.