Billiard Girls

According to the instructions in Billiard Girls, 'if you win, you can look forward to enjoying lots of naked skin'. So with five lovely ladies to play billiards against and that promise in mind, we got stuck in... and won around forty games to no avail.

These girls are Mary Whitehouses of mobile smut, keeping their vests and under-garments firmly in place. You'd only be more disappointed if they started adding layers back on - something that could result in you winning the game only to be offered a congratulatory screen and your defeated lady modelling a burqa.

Still, we're fairly convinced there must be some way to get their kits off and that it must involve winning a series of games in a row without losing, but it certainly not made clear.

And it's not the only thing either. Picking out the solid and striped balls during each game of billiards amounts to guesswork too. Fortunately, auto-aim buttons which scroll your cue into positions that pot the balls you have left on the table stop this from being too much of a problem, but when you have to place the cue ball after a foul it's not always clear which of the balls you're trying to pot.

These two problems aside though, Billiard Girls plays okay.

There are two types of billiards available - 8 or 9 ball. The latter is a straightforward game of billiards where you pot all seven of your balls then the 8-ball to win. 9 ball rules calls for you to sink the nine balls on the table in numerical order. Both types of game are fairly accurately represented. Ball physics are good, although feel lacking in bounce at times. At least the white lines representing where the cue ball is going to go as you're lining up a shot make experimentation easier.

You can play against any of the five 'billiard girls' in any order you like. There's little difference between the competition they offer but they do come out with different quips during the game. If you were a scriptwriter for any type of soft porn mobile game, you'd want it to be billiards. Frankly it's not tough to come up with lines such as: "Show me what your stick can do" and "So are you ready to put it in the hole?"

We're confused as to what: "Do you want to put your balls in my pockets?" means though, but it's the line you get for beating Sarah so we're guessing it's a positive outcome.

The difficulty levels of your lady opponents are fairly inconsistent - they often begin a game messing up the easiest of shots then suddenly start potting balls like Steve Davis on speed. But while there's no learning curve as such, at least they offer the sort of competition that while beatable is also challenging. There's also the option not to play against the AI at all, as Billiard Girls has a two player mode so you can pass a phone back and forth - presumably playing your own form of strip billiards in the process.

Aside from its two player option, Billiard Girls doesn't offer much in the way of extras. The game is resolutely unflashy with a top-down, stationary view of the table and music which wouldn't sound out of place in a lift.

It's quite playable though, simply as the games are short and concise and there's a vague hope that at some point the identical pictures of Laura and co. you get for winning each game might eventually change to show a bit more flesh than an arm.

Still, whether it's this sort of thrill or a honest-to-goodness pool game is what you're after, there are much better examples available elsewhere.