World Snooker Championship 2009 (3D)

In any sport, the question of just when you're too old to compete is one that shadows any professional's career. When the simplest of tasks become an ordeal and even making your way around whatever arena you're playing in is a juddering mess, the chances are, you've been playing too long.

By that reckoning, if World Snooker Championship 09 was a real snooker player, it'd be a talented veteran who often turns up for competitions drunk, his formerly prodigious potting technique only manifesting itself sporadically.

This is very much a series that appears to have taken a backwards step, botching up areas it previously had nailed and failing to captialise on the promising features it had in World Snooker Championship 2008 (3D).

While it comes with everything you might expect from a licensed title – real players and a focus on competing in championships – the actual engine behind the game stuttered and spluttered all over the place on the N95 8GB we reviewed the game on (we also got far from stellar results with an N81 build), playing like it was in slow motion in places and even crashing when things got heated.

The matches themselves are, on the surface, fairly routine affairs. In career mode, moving forward from round to round is a question of winning the most frames – initially the best of three. WSC 09's shot guide can be switched on or off (giving a neat, if short, preview of both where the cue ball and coloured ball should end up), as can the fairly unnecessary and almost uniform 3D player models that only appear to take the actual shot.

Aiming is handled with the '4' and '6' keys, while the power of the shot is assigned to '2' and '8', the former increasing the force used on the cue ball as highlighted by a handy gauge. Tapping '*' lets you choose a specific point on the cue ball to target, and you can also pan around the entire table with the '3' key, making sure you can check out every option available rather than being rooted to the spot. As far as replicating the actions available in a snooker match, WSC 09 doesn't put a foot wrong.

It's the actual taking of the shot itself that most debilitates I-play's third crack at championship snooker. Everything seems to happen a second or so after tapping the keys, the 3D engine whirring into action at the very opposite of what you might term O'Sullivan pace, panning around the table with a jerkier motion than a learner driver after one too many Red Bulls.

General twitching, while annoying, could normally be tolerated, but it's these very convulsions that make aiming your shots so difficult, the irregular nature of casting the camera around the table meaning you can spend many a minute fiddling with the view, only for WSC 09 to pan right past your intended angle with the slightest touch.

In the end, while this rarely affects simple pockets, it can hit the 50-50s, turning a match against you because you miss a risky shot that ultimately should have been put away.

Naturally, your competition – Murphy, Ebdon, O'Sullivan and co – isn't inclined to let you get away with such mistakes, usually capitalising on your errors and clearing the board to rack up their own points.

It's odd, because none of these problems were evident in the previous edition. Ultimately, while this is a fairly comprehensive snooker sim, with a decent upgrade system (tracking your play and upping your skill-set after an impressive shot) and Challenges mode (essentially consisting of a series of trick shots), World Snooker Championship 2009's felt is just a little too lumpy to do the sport it tries so hard to replicate justice.