Adrenaline Pool Lite
by Eric March on November 2, 2008 at 8:57 pm
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(2 votes, average: 3.50 out of 5)
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App Name: Adrenaline Pool Lite
Developer: Eurocenter
Category: Sports Games
I’ll admit, I’m just slightly biased against computerized pool games, but only because I prefer shooting some real stick. Still, there have been quite a few good pool and snooker games come around over the years. Jimmy White slapped his name on a couple of true classics back in the 90s that remain two of my favourites to this day.
Pool on the iPhone has always been a bit of an iffy proposition. Touch controls are fine, but pool is a game of finesse, and it’s hard to finesse a 3.7″ screen with a finger, so it becomes necessary to implement granular fine-tuning controls to get the aim, the power, and the English you want, which is fine, but can be a little cumbersome. So how does Adrenaline pool stack up in the pantheon of digital pool games?
First of all, this lite version features only online play — which is a bit of an unusual twist, since usually they try to hook you in with a good single-player game before they let you play with the other kids. So, pretty cool there, even if the lite version doesn’t let you create profiles or anything. It features 4 games: 8-Ball, 9-Ball, Straight, and my personal favourite, Snooker. Unfortunately, no one I got to play Snooker with me had any idea what the hell they were doing. They kept hitting coloured balls on break. I had to settle for a game of 8-ball instead — and even then the other idiot kept taking aim at stripes. (He was solids.) Seriously, are there no freakin’ pool players out there? Hmpf. I never did get to complete a game; whenever the game informed them that they scratched, they left the damn table.
Oh well. I got what I needed for the review. The good is that it has fairly average physics and per-pixel collision detection as is important for any pool game. No plusses or minuses here. Graphics are very nice, with lovely shiny pool balls and a dash of digital bling in the form of starry impact particles. Sound is decent — what you’d expect from a good pool game.
But how does it play? Well, don’t be expecting finesse here; this is every bit as basic as you can make a pool game without making something other than pool. Aim, power and shoot. Those are your controls. No chalking the cue, no positioning it to give it some English or top/backspin. There’s also no fine-tuning your aim; it’s entrely based around dragging your finger. It is fortunately dampened enough that you can get relatively accurate hip shots off, and there’s even a translucent enlarged cue superimposed on the scene to give you a closeup of the cue’s angle of approach, and a sightline to help you get a bead on your targets (though this last is pretty standard in most pool games, especially mobile ones.)
So, bottom line, this is a friendly game of pool, but it isn’t a simulation by any means. It plays well, don’t get me wrong, and it’s a pretty cool game of pool, especially playing against real opponents (even if that can be frustrating when, like me, you get the dunces who’ve never played before and would be just as likely to try and shovel the balls into the pockets with the rake in a real pool hall). I like it — it’s a good game of basic pool, but don’t expect to be able to prang off clever skin-of-your-teeth bank shots or give the cue ball some spin to set up your next shot.
The full version features a single-player mode, score tracking and a leaderboard, plus the ability to set up a nckname and profile, and more — but it’ll cost you a fiver.
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