Midnight Pool Review

Costas Stephanides ’s Review

One of the best pool games out there - without a doubt

You may have noticed that we like our pool games here and we have reviewed quite a few. This is definitely up there with the best of them.

The game grabs you from the moment it loads, Midnight Pool is one of the few games to actually have a licensed tune - the awesome Sweet Home Alabama by Lynard Skynard. Once over the shock, you can start to play the game. There are many options from a quick random game to the money grabbing tournament. There is a very good tutorial system to show the basics of the controls and how to perform jump and curve shots.

What is also great about the game is that there are three different versions of pool that you can play. US pool with 15 stripes and solids, UK pool with the red and yellow balls or you can choose to play 9 ball. They all have slight differences so it may be worth your while to quickly skim through the supplied rules for each game.

Graphically, the game matches up to its competitors very well. The screen size is used to the maximum and the table and balls are all well drawn. The table takes up two thirds of the screen and the remainder is filled by your character. There is good animation during the shots and there is no jerky action. Although the stripe balls do look very strange when they roll. This is a memory issue and is much preferred to any stuttering animation.

As already mentioned the sound is very good and is one of its best features. Sweet Home Alabama and similar sounding riffs are played at the beginning and end of matches. The only sound in-game is when the cue strikes ?? which is a relief considering the amount of ball smashing that can occur.

The cue can be moved left and right. Pressing 1 or 3 auto-centres the cue to the nearest one of your balls. You can cycle through to get to the ball you want to hit (see the hints for a cunning use of this feature). One really good feature is that you can skip the spin options and go straight to the shot power. Pressing 5 starts the power gauge and pressing 5 again sets your power ?? pretty simple really. If you want to add spin then press 0 once you are happy with your cue angle. In the spin options you have great control over where you want to strike the ball to create the desired spin or special trick shots. All in all a very good control system.

Midnight Pool has plenty of game modes with lots of characters to unlock and even different coloured cues??!! Not quite as exciting as getting an invisible sword in Soul Calibur. The easiest way to unlock the characters is to get stuck in to the tournament mode.

For the tournament you have the option to select which pool game to play. Personally, I would avoid 9 ball as you can get caught by some bad luck and its dependant on skill. The tournament is completed if you manage to beat all 10 characters. Before each match, you can bet against your opponent to make things a little more interesting. If you win the match you win your bet and get some prize money. During the match you can gain bonus cash by performing plants, doubles or potting streaks. After each victory, the opponent is unlocked and their cue should become available. The opponent will also set you a challenge for some big bucks. You can have as many attempts as you want although the winnings will go down after each attempt. If you get truly stuck and cannot figure out the shot (there are some tough challenges out there), don??t worry you can pass the challenge and proceed on to the next match. If you lose a match your are given 2 attempts to try and beat them again. It should be pretty easy to get through the tournament with all the available continues. At the end you enter the high score table which is based on your overall winnings and the percentage completed (this includes the results from the challenges).

As well as Tournament you can play a quick game against the CPU. Both characters are randomly selected each time you play. Unfortunately US Pool is always selected in this mode; it would have been cool to have random game as well as running total of win/loss. As with all mobile games, memory is a big issue ?? at least for the time being.

Just in case you were wondering, Midnight Pool also has a two player Versus option where you have to pass the handset after each shot. With a bit of luck the next release will be Bluetooth compatible.

All in all a great pool game, excellent atmospheric graphics and cool sounds. A sturdy control system and more than enough gameplay and longevity to shake a stick at.