World Championship Pool 2007 (3D)

Playing pool in the northern town of Berwick-upon-Tweed has two distinct advantages: it's cheap, and you'll always get a game. The locals operate a system whereby nobody playing can have money down, so if two people are having a game and a stranger arrives, he can put his change on the table and be challenging the winner in a matter of minutes. No 'Berwicka', however psychotic, ever violates this rule.

The people of Berwick-upon-Tweed adhere to a principle that tedious change-piling students, novelty table manufacturers, and some of the more misguided pool game developers don't: respect the table.

Thankfully, developer Blade Interactive seems to understand the principle just as well. World Championship Pool 2007 3D – let's just call it WCP 3D – is a model of purity, with no exotic variants of pool that you'll never play, no oddly-shaped tables, and with Trickshot and Challenge modes that serve to improve your game and nothing else.

Which isn't to suggest that WCP 3D is rudimentary. The graphics are not only solid and flowing, but the environments in which you play are comprehensively detailed. Spectators line the arena, framed by brickwork pillars and windows, while the table itself is rendered down to the screws in the frame, and dappled with shadow from the overhead light. If you like, you can even watch your avatar lean over the table to take his shot.

Each of the eight characters has his own appearance and ability profile, comprising different levels of skill in Power, Spin, and Accuracy. None of the players is dramatically better than the others, but they are all subtly different, meaning that you can not only choose the character most appropriate to your own style, but set yourself the target of completing the game with each of them.

Four modes are offered: Arcade, Championship, Trick Shots, and Challenge, the latter two of which are not dissimilar. In both, you're presented with a table and a task. In Trickshot, the balls might be arranged to form an alley, into which you need to steer the cueball with a single stroke, while in Challenge you generally get as many strokes as you need to pot a series of balls.

There are seven each of these, and while neither mode makes for much of a game in itself, they're an excellent way of honing your weight and direction.

In Championship you're able to choose from the three most common types of pool: 9-Ball, US 8-Ball, and UK 8-Ball. You begin at the quarter-final stage, taking on three opponents in best-of-three matches.

In Arcade, meanwhile, you don't get to choose your variation. Instead, you need to plough through whatever the game throws at you, beating opponents at every type of pool and taking on trick shots between matches. In essence, Arcade is the whole game spilled into a sack and then laid out, match by match, in a breadcrumb trail for you to follow.

All of which is very well, but arguably the only aspect of the game worth a single fig takes place on the baize. If the physics don't work, nothing does.

And it's here, alas, so close to the finishing line, that WCP 3D takes a small but costly stumble. For the most part, playing the game is seamless and untroubled. The interface enables you to zoom up and away from the table with '3', raise and lower the camera with '2' and '8', impart spin with '#', raise and lower the cue with '*', and generally do all that you need to do through a natural and unobtrusive interface.

Trajectories are indicated with a line of chevrons, which swivels around to show where the object ball will go once you drive the cueball into it. In terms of direction, this is accurate, but a problem arises every time you try to hit anything less than half ball.

In life, hitting a ball at an angle causes it to move slower than it would if hit dead on. Pool 3D magnifies the effect tenfold, so that the object ball crawls when it should be sprinting, and you have to hit the cueball much harder than the shot requires just to impart enough force.

Ultimately, you learn to work around this peculiarity, but it goes some way to breaking the spell that the superb graphics and interface manage to cast, and robs WCP 3D of a place ahead of its rivals instead of comfortably amongst them.

World Championship Pool 2007 (3D)

With excellent graphics and a smooth, user-friendly interface, World Championship Pool has the ingredients of a world-beating pool sim. Some shaky physics lets it down in places, but this is still one of the best players on the pool games circuit
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Rob Hearn
Rob Hearn
Having obtained a distinguished education, Rob became Steel Media's managing editor, now he's no longer here though.