Back in the far distant past, which is to say last year, I got sucked into the browser version of Suika Game. Despite being very simple to play, I could play it all day even as the wonky physics drove me bonkers.
Well now there’s a game called POOOOL, and it’s like Suika Game, but with balls on a pool table instead of fruit in a jar. Hitting two white ball together makes a red ball, hitting two red balls together makes an orange ball, and so on until you connect two giant purple balls to clear them from the table. Simple, right?
No, not quite. Every ball entering the table is on the same spot, so unlike Suika Game, you can’t aim for a better shot elsewhere. Using a mouse to first click on the table and hold it while pulling the mouse in any direction determines the angle and power of the shot. So there’s a bit more to consider than just dropping fruit in a jar.
At first, I made a huge mistake by clicking on the newest ball and drawing back. It’s a mistake because reaching the bottom of the screen limits the power of the shot, and once the game starts placing larger balls in the starting position, they barely travel more than a few centimeters. I eventually sorted out that it was better to either click on the ball I wanted to connect with across the table, or to click just outside of the table’s border if I wanted to try a bank shot. Then I would draw a line back to the new ball, and maybe even draw past it if I thought the shot needed more oomph. After getting the hang of it, I got a high score of twenty thousand.
Much like Suika Game, I’ve sunk a lot of time into POOOOL, but I admit, this time the wonky physics have soured me on playing it all day. For one thing, the smaller balls have an insane amount of kinetic energy and little friction. If I power shoot one into a lager ball to move it out of the way, the smaller ball will often hit the ball, hit two banks, and then slam into the same ball from the other side, moving it right back to where it was before.
But once the table starts to fill up with balls, even the loosest rules of physics go right out the window. Power shots cause little to no reaction from hitting multiple balls together, and using a light shot can sometimes make every ball explode into motion. There’s no discernible rhyme or reason to it, so in the higher levels, it all just comes down “take the shot and pray” rather than having any kind of strategy to escape a packed table.
I’m not saying I hate it, though. It’s fine in short sessions, making it a great game to play with morning tea or just before heading to bed. But if I play too many games back to back, the jank really starts to chafe my sensitive gamer sensibilities. There are rules to every game, but if the rules change or start working completely different mid-game, why that’s just insanity.
I’d still give POOOOL 4 stars, because like I said, it is great fun in smaller doses. I’d recommend it to fans of puzzle games, but it’s really fun for anyone looking to smack a few balls together.
And in conclusion, uh huhuhuhu, I said balls. (Sorry, I blame SNL and Ryan Gosling for resurfacing teenage drunk memories.)