8 Ball Corner Pocket | Pure Pool Review

Pool is a classy game. You are supposed to have a glass of whiskey in your hand, a cigar in your mouth, and some money placed on the table to remind everyone why they’re playing. It’s a game that allows people to talk calmly as they have something to do besides fiddle with their hands. Virtual pool games don’t quite carry that seem feel to them, but nevertheless they are still fun to play. Pure Pool is one of those simulation games that is very simple, but is also remarkably addicting.

I will admit I am not the biggest billiards fan. I certainly enjoy it and I see the incredible challenge in it (since I’m not very good). The last pool video game I played was most likely Super Money Ball 2. I didn’t think a realistic pool simulation game would really carry my interest, but I judged far too soon. After getting the hang of the controls, Pure Pool has been my go to game lately.

Pure Pool looks great. There are no excuses for graphics when you develop a billiards game on a PS4, so I was hoping the graphics would at least be nice, and they certainly didn’t disappoint. The background movements of people hanging around a bar attempts to resemble the atmosphere that I mentioned above. It doesn’t do much for the game, but it is better than being in an empty room. The music is also a nice tough. Nothing distracting, but very calming as if you are in a bar just playing pool with some buddies.

The game itself plays wonderfully, and I never noticed anything strange in the physics. I never felt I was cheated or the game was lying to me. Every shot felt right and if something didn’t go right it was most likely my own fault. It is important to get the physics in a game all about physics (technically it is when you think about it) and Pure Pool did so successfully. Even down to the sound of each ball colliding with one another resonated that charming unique sound of pool.

The gameplay is easy to understand and that makes it extremely addicting. You line up your shot, determine the spin, and pulling back on the right joystick determines the power in your shot. You can see where the ball will go and it will even have guidelines for the ball that connects with the cue ball. It even will adjust for a better or worse shot. When you scrape the side of a ball you won’t know exactly where it will go, but a wide cone will show you the probable direction it will head in. That means you still need to get in good position and line up proper shots. You still need skill to sink balls in the pocket, the game doesn’t do everything for you. You can increase the difficulty and those guidelines will disappear, so it makes Pure Pool great for beginners and pros alike.

Unless you’re an extreme lover of pool, you need more than one type of game mode to keep you around. Pure Pool does just that as it offers: US 8-Ball, 9-Ball, Killer, and Accumulator. You can pick your poison and if those games start to grow old there are also challenges to occupy your time which are: Speed Pot, Checkpoint, Perfect Potter, and Royal Rumble. I found myself spending a majority of my time on the challenges. They are quick and easy to beat, but difficult to master. You’ll feel good about yourself until you check the leaderboards and see how bad you really are. What takes me two minutes took someone else eleven seconds.

There are also tournaments you can compete in against the computer, plus countless accumulates (challenges) to acquire that range from trick shots to sinking a certain amount of balls in the same pocket. You can even level up, and unlock some nifty new pool cues among other things. The leveling up doesn’t really matter gameplay-wise, but it gives you a little something else to strive for.

There is plenty to do offline, and a majority of the time I practiced my own shots to see what I would be able to sink. You can also take your skills online against other players, but the match making is a little tricky to handle. It may smooth out, but as of now I was only able to find a few matches from the dozens of times I tried to find one. You can also challenge people but that never really seemed to work either. This could also be due to people not wanting to play online, but the way the system works it is a little hard to be sure.

That leads me into some of the main issues I have with pure Pool. The entire time you are playing, there is a scroll bar at the top of the screen with other player’s names appearing. There is nothing that annoyed me more than this ever present onslaught of people I don’t know and don’t care to know. If there was some way to turn it off I couldn’t find it, and seeing people’s names flash takes away from all the work put into the realistic bar background.

There is also no way to view the table from the top. You can stand up to get a bit better of a view, but it isn’t enough. The entire table isn’t even on the screen the whole time and you can lose sight of the ball when it rolls to the edges. Along this line, I would’ve liked to see a radar option or something of the sort to find my balls easier. In real life it takes a quick dart of your eyes to see the table. In Pure Pool you need to stand up from the table and then look around slowly. It doesn’t take THAT long, but it takes long enough that I never bothered doing it. It makes it difficult to line up any wall shots, which on that note, there are no diamonds on the edges to help line up your shots. Something that seems a little silly to leave out of a pool game.

This game has multiple instances where it takes unnecessarily long. I understand pool is a game of patience and you aren’t supposed to rush through it, but I if I’m practicing by myself I wish I could skip to my next shot. After sinking a shot I want to immediately setup my next shot. I don’t need to watch as the cue balls rolls slowly to its new location. Along those lines, I would’ve loved to be able to skip the computer’s turn. I don’t need to watch the computer sink the rest of the balls to win the game. If I lost the game, I would rather get to the end to start another one. Instead, I had to sit there for five minutes watching shot after shot go into until the computer inevitably sinks the 8-ball. Sometimes they even pause on their shots and nothing would happen for a few seconds. A computer should shoot instantly, it doesn’t need to wait or fake aiming. A simple press of the button would fix all of this.

Even the loading times make this game seem longer than it needs to be. I was a little surprised by how long it would take to load a simple game. This is pool on a PS4! It should be instant, and sometimes it was, but other times there would be this delay that looked like the game froze. There wasn’t a loading bar or anything, and I was never sure if the game crashed. It never did to be fair, but that’s how long the loading times felt.

Pure Pool is a great pool game for anyone out there who loves pool and knows it way better than I do. For those out there like me where pool is a hobby and nothing more, Pure Pool is still a great purchase. I wasn’t sure how long my attention would be kept, but I was surprised to see hours flying by on the clock, and when I had a spare minute I would sit down to play a quick game. There are some errors that a simple patch could clean up almost immediately, but none of them ruin the game as is. Pure Pool is a solid simulation that brings one of the classiest games to one of the classiest systems.

This review is based off a review code of the Playstation 4 version of Pure Pool developed by VooFoo Studios and distributed by Ripstone Games.