Don’t get fooled by this innocuous name, because this harmless looking title has all the ingredients to make you go mad and leave you drained. Launched amidst a lot of anticipation, it has completely failed to follow the script and has instead turned out to be a real boogeyman. Pocket Pool, in essence, is a portable pool game, and offers you several variations, but its pedestrian gameplay mechanism and physics have sucked the spirit out of it.
The game at face value appears really interesting, as you are presented with several variations, such as 8-ball, 9-ball, 15-ball, rotation, snooker, and the like. Once you start the proceedings, however, you will immediately feel trapped in a no-win situation. The fact that you can indulge in certain game features, like by choosing the location you’re going to play in, table type, cue type, and ball set, notwithstanding, you still have to deal with glaring inadequacies staring at your face. First, there is nothing innovative and new in these games in Pocket Pool (PSP), which takes a great deal of curiosity and excitement away; instead they are rather generic and outrageously ugly. You will particularly be at your wits end when you realize that the ball used during default option is overtly heavy and won’t get any bounce at all! Furthermore, the ball speed is terrible and there are few things that you can do to overcome these inherent flaws. The scheme of things takes just a U turn once you switch to the high setting option, where the balls seems to bounce at the slightest instigation!
There are hardly any surprises as far as the game’s control scheme is concerned. It uses the basic power meter that you can bring up by holding down the circle button, unlike other games where you are provided with an analog stick to measure power, or wind up for a shot. Another big disappointment is that a game like pool requires subtle cue movements to make subtle angles, and what you get is the outdated D pad feature which makes the shot making really frustrating. Furthermore, though you can adjust a few things like spin and angle, it appears rather redundant as their uses are very limited in the earlier levels.
The funniest part of the game is actually the computer generated opponents which come in a variety of shades and will invariably test your patience. Lacking in spirit and attitude, most of them are headshots of some of the models in the game. Nevertheless, for those die hard fans who are still interested in this insipid game, despite all its shortcomings, there is good news in the element of unpredictability lurking around and also to an extent in the game’s AI.
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...
