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Free balls awarded, Part 3

by RevStu (October 23rd, 2010 at 10:44 am)

Since we’ve been talking about free pool-hall games this week, it would be silly not to mention a couple more that are worthy of your attention. You’ll have to hurry if you want to get Pool Bar – Online Hustle for free (it’s only on promotion for 24 hours, and is normally priced at £1.79/€2,39/$2.99), but it’s worth the effort. As noted by an alert viewer in our forum, its code is clearly very closely related to that of Pool Star (and Ronnie O’Sullivan’s Snooker), but with a few key differences.

Firstly, there are no single-player tournament modes (just a Quick Match against a handful of CPU opponents at various selectable difficulty levels), but to compensate you do get a bunch of GameCentre achievements to play for, as well as lovely sharp Retina graphics (not seen in Pool Star).

The gameplay itself is also different in a couple of significant ways – you have to swipe the cue instead of pressing a button to make a shot (which is mildly annoying when the ball is near a cushion, but works well enough), while on the upside you get an Expert aiming option that’s not present in Pool Star, which shows you the trajectory for the cueball only, not the object ball. This makes the game a lot more skillful, and it’s worth picking up for that reason alone.

And finally on the subject of freebie pool-games, Doodle Pool merits a few moments of your appraisal too. The mere presence of the word “doodle” in a title causes many to recoil in fear, and with good cause, but this is one of the finest efforts to bear the prefix.

An excellent and extremely simple control system is demonstrated by an optional tutorial, and then you’re straight into a really fun arcade pool knockabout. You get US 8-ball, UK 8-ball and US 9-ball games, each of which can be played in one of four ways – you against one of eight CPU opponents (unlocked in sequence), you against another human (local only), a Time Trial where you have to achieve your goal (eg pot the 9-ball) in a solo game against the clock with time penalties for fouls, and finally the highly original “Shot In The Dark” mode.

The latter is an action-focused game where you only have a few seconds to make your shot, with the screen fading steadily into complete darkness as the time ticks away. You score points based on how fast you make pots, and lose them for potting nothing (small penalty) or making foul shots (huge penalty). It’s a great little game, and an OpenFeint message pops up when you get a new high score, but oddly the mode doesn’t actually appear in the OpenFeint leaderboards. (All the others do, so presumably it’s a bug/oversight that should be fixed in an update.)

In one-player mode the later CPU opponents are terrifyingly good – almost flawless, in fact, with particularly good safety play – and trying to beat them is an addictive challenge in itself, but the other modes make Doodle Pool a game with plenty of replay value, particularly once they fix Shot In The Dark. The game has cost money in the past but has been free for the last six weeks, and while it comes with an optional in-app purchase to remove ads, I’ve never actually seen any ads in it. (I can’t see anywhere ads could go ingame without obscuring vital parts of the screen, so at worst they should be on menu screens.) Your experience may, or may not, vary. But if you’ve got any interest in an arcade-style pool videogame, you should definitely check this one out.

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