Pool Party (Wii) - Review by Chris

Introduction

Over the years, the sport of pool, if you can call it a sport, has become increasingly popular with the mainstream audience. Viewing figures for pool on TV stations and the number of people playing it have increased dramatically and as a result, we've seen a wider range of pool related titles being released on consoles. While it's not a particularly interesting sport to bring to consoles, developers have each taken their turn to produce a spin on it resulting in some very hit and miss efforts. And so here we have another pool title, this time for the Wii, from developers Hyper Devbox and published by South Peak Games but unlike other titles, this has done very little to make the sport enjoyable.

Gameplay

Gameplay focuses on the game of pool and some of its variants. That's as complex as it gets really, as there is no career mode or league to play your way through leaving a very basic set of tasks to play. So immediately, the lastability of the title is pretty low. There are a decent number of modes available for playing through, 13 in total, but they mostly fall down to having only slight differences from one another. Your standard 8 ball and 9 ball pool modes are here and you can set it up to go up against either a friend or the computer and the developers have also been nice in including two snooker modes for those wanting something with a more lengthy appeal. As there are no major modes to play through, the game's various unlockables, which come down to different balls, tables, locations and pool cues, can only be ascertained through playing matches in the available modes and they are literally given out at random for winning a match, which is something you won't manage very often.

While there are these 13 modes and you have to ability to play off against the computer, you'll soon wish you hadn't bothered because the difficulty, both in terms of the controls and that of your artificial opponent, waver obscene amounts. At times, the AI can be ridiculously stupid choosing to try and be smart with its shots by bouncing off of the cushions and ultimately missing shots that should and are easy enough to pot. But at other times, the AI is completely the opposite and unbelievably difficult to beat, using the same bouncing the cue ball off of the cushions technique to hit shots that wouldn't remotely be doable in a real game of pool. This constant fluctuation in the difficulty means that a fair match against the available AI is not achievable and for the most part, you'll always be on the losing end.

Controls

The 9 ball pool game available in Wii Play showed that the sport could do well with the Wii's controls if they were used properly. Well, it seems that Hyper Devbox completely ignored what Nintendo had set out in what is essential a tech demo because the controls implemented here are so convoluted and complicated that getting to grips with them takes an age, and even after a significant amount of time with the game, you'll still not be able to pull off shots easily because they are such a mess. The entire aiming mechanic is fixed to the analogue stick of the Nunchuk, but there is an option to use the IR pointer and turn your aim but it doesn't make much difference because it's so inaccurate. The slightest touch of the controls will send your aim completely off and as already mentioned, trying to hit the perfect shot or angle on a ball is virtually impossible because you're not given free aim on where you can hit the ball. The worse part about the controls is the actual shooting. Where you'd think the developers would focus on motion to recreate the feel of the sport, they haven't done this. Instead, you hold the B button to bring up a power meter which you adjust with the analogue stick and then simply flick the remote forward to do the shot. Your gesture has no effect on the spin or speed of the ball as it's all done through the press of a button, completely missing the point of the controller and its interface.

Graphics

The game was never going to look particularly great. It is a pool title after all. But what you actually see is incredibly mediocre and looks like an early Dreamcast game. A budget title this may be but others have managed to hit the same price point and be presented in a high quality whereas this hasn't. The tables and the balls all look very basic, with poor lighting and reflection, and the use of screen cluttering images for the players and for your aiming coordinates mean that the whole thing is just badly designed. The menus also share the same issues, being very basic but a pain to navigate.

Sound

The game's soundtrack is heavily laden with techno-pop which quickly becomes irritating. You'll find yourself muting the game just to get away from it and constantly keeping it turned off in the option menu so you don't have to hear it again. The sound effects for the balls are of a similarly poor quality, sounding nothing like the real thing and instead sounding like the game is being played in an aircraft hangar.

Final comments

This review has been pretty damning of this game and rightly so. It's a very poor effort to bring the sport to the Wii from a publisher who has a decent track record on the console, with titles such as Mushroom Men. It's baffling to see how badly the developers have messed up with the controls when something as basic as Wii Play can get them so right. And with so little in the way of longevity due to issues with the AI and with the modes available, this is one title that shows exactly how far the industry has progressed because this feels like something that would have been released in the early PC days. Definitely a title to avoid at all costs.

Pro: A somewhat decent variety of modes and unlockables
Con: Poor presentation, awful controls, bad AI
Final score: 3

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