Review | Pool Hall Pro

Format: PC / Wii | Genre: Sports | Publisher: Playlogic | Developer: Icon Games | Out now: £29.99

By Andy Johnson

A rather worryingly large proportion of my time and money is spent on the noble pursuit of pool. Many games and sports have been turned into videogames before, and pool is no exception, normally tackled alongside snooker and its variants. In fact, I think I got into the 2D obscurity Cue Club long before I even played the real game - which probably reflects on me quite badly, now I think about it.

Pool Hall Pro is another effort in the long cue-to-controller tradition, but the question is: should it be our go-to game for when we can’t be bothered to attend a real bricks-and-mortar baize establishment?

//Foul shot
The blunt answer is no. Pool Hall Pro largely fails because it is unable to complete its most fundamental objective: to create an entertainingly realistic simulation of the game it depicts. The crucial underlying reason for this is that Pool Hall Pro’s physics are extremely rudimentary. Pool and snooker are games almost totally about mastery over physics, about conducting a shot from its conception in the mind, through the body, through the cue, through the balls, and hopefully into the pockets. But the interactions between the cue, the balls and the table in this game bear only a passing resemblance to real life, and it’s not enough to make this genuinely enjoyable. It’s a passable, perfunctory experience, not the finessed pleasure it ought to be. Most crippling is the interaction between balls and pockets – the latter often seem to be mini black holes, oddly sucking in any balls unfortunate enough to move into their radius.

In fairness, Pool Hall Pro does at least show a plethora of options to the player. A wide variety of game variants are available, each playable in about a dozen different environments, including the rather risky idea of playing on a rooftop in Chinatown. That kind of stuff is just what pool games need – their potential for daft escapism and being able to fantasise about living such a snazzy pro pool lifestyle is one of the few genuine trump cards they have over the real thing. Unfortunately, Pool Hall Pro’s presentation is so bad that the escapism is thoroughly shattered on a regular basis. Dumbly applauding NPCs standing around in venues, wholly unnecessary in the first place, are horrific cardboard-cutout-esque excuses for models, and a distraction from the play. Textures are bafflingly flat given that this is 2009, and the music is just the usual sports game guff. The PC version is woefully optimised, menus accessible only via keyboard control, and features like the ability to customise your pool “crib” are naïve fig leaves designed to cover Pool Hall Pro’s core inadequacies.

This game offers quantity over quality. Had the developers chosen to dump some of the wholly needless parts of the game and focused on crafting a genuinely engaging pool experience, we might have had something deserving of our time here. As it is, what we have is a game which often appears far more concerned with giving us several different low-res costumes for Jimmy “The Rocket” Peters than it is with accurately simulating, or even abstractly representing, the games it’s meant to be about.

3/10

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