8-Ball Pocket Review

8-Ball Pocket has the power to make you reminisce about your favourite snooker or pool game. Mine’s Side Pocket, with a bit of Jimmy White’s Whirlwind Snooker, if you’re asking. It got me reminiscing because I had an itch that I wanted a pool game to scratch, and 8-Ball Pocket completely failed to scratch it. It kind of punched the itch instead. 

Let’s aim for the positives first: it’s cheap. At £4.99, 8-Ball Pocket falls into that tempting sub-£5 bracket, which might sound like a good idea when you compare it to the stacks of pounds you might spend on a pool machine at an arcade. It’s also got the very basic options right: you can play single player, against the CPU if needed, and there’s room for four players to play locally. Squint your eyes, and there’s everything you might need from an American Billiards game. 

But that’s where the compliments end, I’m afraid. Because 8-Ball Pocket is about as thin and appealing as one of John Virgo’s waistcoats. 

There are two modes in 8-Ball Pocket (ignore the ‘Training’ mode, which isn’t a tutorial and certainly doesn’t train you): Arcade Mode and VS Mode. Arcade Mode is a curious one to stick in the foreground. It’s a single-player variant, where you try to sink all the balls with a limited number of shots. Sink a colour or band, and the number of shots will stay where it is. Miss a shot, and the number will tick down. You can increase the number of shots by sinking a number of balls in sequence, and there’s a score tallying up, rewarding you for potting balls in sequence. Not that the score means much, as there’s no highscore or reward. 

So, it’s a game of American Billiards, played with yourself, with the added benefit of not really caring for colours or bands, and some half-hearted rules around the number of shots. But it’s the meat of 8-Ball Pocket, as the achievements focus on that mode solely (albeit the achievements are not easy to get), and you have a number of levels to move through (where nothing really changes). As we mentioned, it’s a strange mode to plop down in the foreground. 

VS Mode has some options to fiddle with, primarily involving teams. You can have four human players and CPUs, in any permutation across two teams. Then you’re chucked into a game of basic American Billiards, pool, 8-Ball or whatever you happen to call it. It’s the rules that you likely know and love, with the winner being the team that pots the black after downing their choice of colours or bands. 

The CPU AI has a curious approach to 8-Ball. It’s a demon at the long-shot, and can pot and set up its next shot with an O’Sullivan-like swagger. It’s rather good, and – of course – there’s no ability to improve or reduce its skill levels. But then it starts feeling sorry for you, and pulls off the most bizarre shots. It’ll twat the black ball or hit your balls first, handing you a foul and free placement of the white. If you can snooker the CPU player, it will have an existential crisis and probably pot one of your balls. The CPU’s a bit like our mate Jonny, who can pull off the most improbable shots and then drunkenly nudge the white ball with his fingers. 

Then there are the controls. Oh, the controls. May we compare thee to a migraine? They sink 8-Ball Pocket, and we’d love to know why the designers thought they were the best approach. 

We wondered if we had stick-drift while playing 8-Ball Pocket. It was possible: we have an Elite II controller, and they’re known for it. But no: we tried it on multiple pads, and the dotted directional line has a very inconsistent habit of spinning around the game screen. The only conclusion we can make is that it is impossibly sensitive, with a tap on the analogue stick sending it continually around and around until you jolt it to a stop. 

You can tap LB and RB for more subtle increments, so – if you can get the dotted guideline near the ball – then you can finesse it into the right place. Then you are choosing the spin on the ball with a simple and effective tough of the d-pad, before defining the amount of power. 

This last bit is where it gets unfathomable. You can increase power by pressing or holding Y. You can decrease power by pressing or holding A. And you can take your shot by pressing B. Without a tutorial and only an unhelpful control screen to guide, it can take a while to arrive at this conclusion. Because in no way, not in any alternate universe, is this an intuitive or expected control mapping. It’s just odd, like the developers wanted to find a way to use every face button. We kept stumbling over the controls – even after we’d played a good twenty or thirty times. 

The ball-physics are mostly fine. We have some suspicions (but very little proof) that there are a few quirks: the balls have a tendency to cluster and stick together, more than we are used to in real life, for example, and you can smack a ball with inhuman strength, without any jumping from the table. But generally, the balls clink and clatter with enough realism to maintain the illusion. 

We just wish 8-Ball Pocket was a little less dumb. The targeting focuses on the next number, rather than anything like a sensible next shot. This means that we were back to wrestling the awful guidance controls. And there’s no ability to lock to the middle of the ball you’re aiming at. The guideline is so thick, the balls so small, and the aiming increments large enough to create situations where you simply can’t line up a shot that is just right. 

And, ultimately, there just isn’t enough here. 8-Ball Pocket is a lightweight, plainly presented little pool game, which doesn’t have the modes, options or customisation to warrant even a £4.99 purchase. In a world with a bewildering number of pool variants, there’s no real excuse for packaging in a bizarre solo option and a vanilla multiplayer option. 

We’re going to head back to Side Pocket. We’d recommend returning to your choice of alternative.

You can buy 8-Ball Pocket from the Xbox Store

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