Do the Danger Room first

01The Danger Room doubles everything else

Danger Room training is done in single-ball play with no mode running, by hitting the spinner, the targets, the bumper and the ramp. It looks like housekeeping and it is the most valuable thing on the machine.

Level one, green, doubles all mission scoring. Levels two and three make the future easier and more valuable: level two takes one sentinel off what you need to escape, and level three counts every sentinel twice, both for value and for progress. Every level also raises multiball scoring.

The part that makes this practical rather than aspirational is that progress towards level one carries from ball to ball until you reach it. So even a bad ball moves you towards doubling every mission in the rest of the game.

Getting all three levels in one game also hands you Cyclops' perk, which lengthens the combo timers.

02Completing a mission is only half the job

Finish a mission and you travel to the future, which is a timed mode where sentinels have taken over and nothing else can be started. Defeat six of them and the centre ramp and right loop light to escape back to the past.

The perk is awarded on escaping, not on completing the mission. Run out of time, fail to defeat enough sentinels, or fail to make the escape shot, and you go back to the past with nothing to show for the mission you just won.

Each of the eight missions has its own character and its own perk, and those perks are permanent and active in both past and future play. Colossus lengthens the ball saves on every multiball for the rest of the game. Completing Sentinel Facility Raid and escaping gives an add-a-ball you can use once per multiball by holding the action button while it flashes green.

Shots to the giant sentinel head raise what each sentinel is worth, running white, green, yellow, red, adding a multiplier at every colour change. Destroy thirty-five sentinels across the game and the uptown ramp lights for Berzerker Multiball.

03Four skill shots, and one that is not about points

A soft plunge into the lane by the highway ramp pays 200,000 and a bonus multiplier. The X-Jet shot feeds the X-Mansion ramp for three bonus multipliers, and if the ball goes up the ramp the danger room exit ramp becomes a super skill shot.

The downtown shot can be repeated for up to a five-way time loop combo, and completing all five lights the left ramp for a final shot that adds fifteen seconds to your ball save timer. On a machine this fast, fifteen seconds of ball save is worth more than most point awards.

The fourth is the left ramp for a Cerebro skill shot, which spots a shot's worth of progress towards To Me, My X-Men multiball.

04Eight missions, and the perfect condition on each

Missions are lit by hitting white shots and started at any blue arrow, the midtown centre ramp or the subway right loop. The first needs one white shot and each subsequent mission needs more. The four corner missions are the easy tier and the four between them are the challenging tier.

Every mission also carries a perfect condition, which is a different way of playing it rather than simply doing it faster. Rescue the Innocent wants at least one shot scored at 5x, built up through the Bishop bumper. Bitter Rivalry wants nothing but blue shots. Smuggled Cargo wants nothing but the blinking purple ones, which finishes the mission in five shots instead of seven. Stopping a Juggernaut wants more than twenty-five seconds left on the clock.

In the challenging tier, A Fiery Assault wants every red shot collected before you take three blue ones, and Genosha Under Siege wants nothing but green shots, which are worth double the red ones anyway.

Extra balls light at the right inlane after three missions and again after seven, and only the first time through.

05The four perks you can take without a mission

Beast's Lab advanced to level three lets Beast's Lab awards be collected in the future, which is otherwise a dead zone for everything except sentinels.

Ten hits on the X-Mansion ball save target gives Jean Grey, which lets the right outlane ball save rule advance during the future and makes the next level two Beast's Lab award a guaranteed X-Mansion ball save.

Twenty hits on the purple Nightcrawler targets makes those targets count towards destroying sentinels in the future, which changes what the future feels like considerably.

These are worth knowing precisely because they arrive from ordinary play. You are hitting those targets anyway; the question is whether you finish the count.

06Stacking, and the one mode that overrides everything

A multiball can be stacked with a mission provided the mission was started first. Multiballs cannot be stacked on each other.

Berzerker Multiball takes priority over every other feature in the game, so it is not something to start casually in the middle of something you care about.

If you complete a mission while a multiball is running, the future does not start immediately. The centre ramp lights afterwards so you can take it once the stack is over, which is a small mercy and worth remembering rather than assuming you have lost it.

07The smaller levers

Bishop's bumper, hit enough times, qualifies the action button to spot the most valuable shot during a mode. That is the button to save for a shot you keep missing rather than to spend on the first thing lit.

Gambit's bumper hit three times, or hit with an alley pass to the right inlane, doubles the shot value in your next mode. Combined with a Danger Room level, that is a mission scoring at four times what it would have.

Beast's Lab pays mystery awards whose level rises if you hit ramps before the target, so there is a right way and a wrong way to approach it.

08A note on this source

This one is unusually well provenanced: our copy is a community wiki rulesheet, originally hosted on Tilt Forums, and it states the code revision it was written against, 0.98.

That matters for a machine released in September 2024, because the code is still moving. Values and even mode behaviour may have changed since, and the sheet marks its own uncertainty in a couple of places, which we have left as uncertainty rather than tidying away.

The sheet does not distinguish between the Pro and the Premium or LE anywhere in its rules, and UK floors carry both. Nothing here is written as cabinet-specific, but that is the source's silence rather than a claim by us that every word holds on every machine.