Jimmy White Snooker Legend

The thing about Jimmy White is, he's much vainer than you'd imagine. When he started balding, he got a wig, and a few years ago he actually took the rapper-like step of changing his name to James Brown. The wig has stuck but the name, thankfully, has not.

We can only assume that it's this vanity that has compelled the artists responsible for Gameloft's Jimmy White Snooker Legend to render the game's figurehead as a young, tanned, smooth-skinned Adonis rather than the pale, craggy, and legendarily charismatic figure that Jimmy has always been.

If you're not a snooker fan, of course, you may not detect this extensive airbrushing operation. But if you are, the gleaming Jimmy that grins out at you from this game's title screen, and delivers incongruously prim phrases like, "did you know that every completed challenge adds 1% to your progress status?" will probably make you laugh.

Fortunately, Jimmy White Snooker Legend seems to be directed at people who don't know much about snooker. As opposed to World Snooker Championship and the Ronnie O'Sullivan series, it's a casual, simplistic, top-down affair in which the table only occupies about two-thirds of your mobile's screen, and smirking beefcakes occupy the rest.

You can play as Jimmy, but he's the only licensed player. Joining him are Mark, Russell, and Edward, while six others are unlockable: John, Julian, Adam, Craig, Alex, and Richard. Each has his own rating for Perception, Mental, and Control, and each of them looks like a male stripper.

As you'd expect, the unlockable characters have higher ratings, with the top four being just three points shy of perfection, and the bottom two being a whole five points short of full marks. Oddly, Jimmy is available from the beginning, and has the highest rating – just two points dropped – which undermines the mechanic of progression slightly, but not so as to spoil the game.

Other issues threaten to do that, such as the size of the playing area. The table may only occupy two thirds of the screen, but every bit of its real counterpart's 60 square feet is crammed into the 1x0.5-inch of screen. As a result, playing Jimmy White Snooker Legend is like cueing from a high ceiling. Again, though, this doesn't actually spoil the game so much as mark its cloth.

And once you come to terms with shortcomings like these, Jimmy White Snooker Legend turns out to be a modest but perfectly serviceable snooker game. To take a shot, you rotate the cue with '4' and '6', then press '5' to set the power meter going. If you like, you can press '0' before taking your shot to enter the spin menu.

That's it. The physics are credible, and you can put a break together perfectly well, so while the game is fairly stripped down visually it's also solid where it really matters.

In fact, in places it's more than solid. The tutorial imparts genuinely valuable lessons, like how to control the pace of the cue ball, and from the spin menu you can press '*' to access your Special shots: jumping and swerving the ball. To jump, you just raise the butt of your cue, and to swerve you raise the butt and move it to the side, just like in real snooker.

Accompanying the action on the baize is a single-player campaign mode, in which you create up to three profiles and work your way through five international locations, and a Free Play mode, where you can play as and against any of the characters you've unlocked.

As well as winning games, you can make cash. You get $25 for each ball potted, $100 bonus for making a bank shot (potting a ball along the cushion) or finishing with the highest break, and a $1,000 bonus for a break of 100.

As you make your way through the campaign, you can spend the money you earn in the game's shop buying new cues, and there's also a challenge mode to occupy you should the rigours of competition grow too great. The Challenge mode comprises 30 trick-shots, with the themes of Power, Accuracy, and Rebound.

All of which makes Jimmy White Snooker Legend a much more solid game than its first lacklustre impressions would have you believe. It looks rushed, cheesy, and – to a snooker fan – rather amateurish, but beyond some aesthetic shortcomings and graphics that will undoubtedly be too fidgety for some, there really aren't any crushing flaws to speak of.

It's not pretty, and it seems too old-fashioned to keep pace with its flashier rivals, but through sheer underlying class it manages to just about stay in the game. Airbrush notwithstanding, it's Jimmy to a tee.

Jimmy White Snooker Legend

Jimmy White Snooker Legend looks at first like a token effort, but its lacklustre looks belie a decent game with plenty of options and solid ball physics
Score
Rob Hearn
Rob Hearn
Having obtained a distinguished education, Rob became Steel Media's managing editor, now he's no longer here though.