Pool Billiard

Genre: Sports (Pool)

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local Alternating)

.

Review:

Pure Billiard, alternately simply called Billiard in your game library, is a Pool game released on Nintendo Switch in 2018. It includes versions of 8-Ball, 9-Ball, and Rotation.

The presentation here is okay. It’s nothing special, but it works. The game’s 3D visuals have a largely untextured table (save for the wood grain at the edges), plain-looking balls, and a featureless room, paired with decent sound effects for hitting the balls, backed by uninspired piano and synthesized saxophone, and occasionally punctuated by canned clapping noises.

The gameplay here is fairly rudimentary. The game graciously gives you a few different choices for how much help you’ll get from a guide line, but otherwise this is a fairly straightforward and simple version of the sport.

Players can opt to use more traditional gamepad controls, which work fine but aren’t especially noteworthy, or they can alternately use motion controls. Unfortunately, the latter is gimmicky and tacked-on – your movement doesn’t seem to affect the cue in any way other than to tell it when to strike. You’ll likely swap back to traditional gamepad controls after seeing how uninspired it is.

In fact, “uninspired” seems to describe this game as a whole. It’s a reasonably sufficient game of Pool, but nothing more than that. If you’re looking for something inexpensive to let you play pool on the Nintendo Switch, Pool Billiard will do that. However, don’t expect anything more than a competent but lackluster entry in the genre.

tl;dr – Pool Billiard is a competent but lackluster game of Pool. It gets the job done, but doesn’t do anything more than that. Don’t expect the motion controls to set this game apart, either – they’re tacked-on and do little to convey the experience of a real game of pool.

Grade: C

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Lee, Andy Miller, Stov, u/wonderponder, Johannes, Ilya Zverev, Eli Goodman, and KC. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}