Pool Party (Wii) Review

First up, this isn't a Wii game. It is worse than free-to-play Flash based games you can find all over the Internet. It makes terrible use of the Wii-mote with the unresponsive controls leading you to believe that Satan truly does walk among us and his form is a budget-price pool game for a Nintendo home console system. The whole game just doesn't work.

In terms of production values, this game is seriously lacking. The whole interface looks like someone made it for one of those awesome arcade games you used to play in 1990. Except this game isn't awesome. It is tedious, badly made and truly awful in every conceivable way. The game focuses around all sports relating to hitting balls around a table. There are various different forms of pool and even snooker to 'enjoy', so you simply select your game mode, select which room to play it in (including something that looks a bit like a brothel, which is worrying), which table to play on, which cue to use, which music to have and which character you will use. Dull.

The music will make you rip your eyes out, stuff them in your ears and then shove your head in the microwave to make it stop and leave you alone. One track will loop for the entire game, over and over again. Each time a new player comes to the table someone rings what sounds like a cow-bell and when you leave the table and the game shows you the score of your break it does a 'du-du-dum-cha' drum roll for some reason. This makes no sense.

Graphically it looks like someone forgot. And no, that isn't a typo. It does actually look like someone forgot to do the graphics. This game is just so unbelievably ugly. During a game the giant face of your selected character floats mysteriously in the corner taking up half the screen and preventing you from seeing most of the table. The lighting doesn't quite make sense and the textures have all run away to find something better to do. It is so bland, so unimaginative and such a waste of our time that we're almost lost for words.

Almost. We could perhaps excuse it sounding terrible and looking terrible if it let us play some games of pool on the Wii in a vaguely realistic and fun way. But it doesn't. It crashes every two seconds; it's one of the buggiest games we've ever encountered. A nice example is the top-down view of the table that is rather handy for getting an overview of what's going on...were it not for a large structure of what looks like girders blocking your view. Why are they there? We have no idea. Likewise, try to swing the camera around when you're taking on a shot from the ends of the table in certain rooms and you'll get stuck behind a rather large black 'wall'. Argh.

Any game that happily proclaims on its box an 'immersive sound environment that enhances the gameplay experience' is going to fall onto problems. There really isn't a lot to do in this game aside from play different forms of pool, and even that sucks. You can unlock new cues and other items, but for some reason whenever you save something it disappears the next time you come to play. We could go on complaining about all the things wrong with this game for days, but we've got better things to do with our lives and undoubtedly so do you.