Welcome to my first review of a pool game on Switch aptly called Billiard.
I need to be honest about something prior to writing this review. I love billiards and I used to play pool on a near professional level a little over 10 years ago. I was a master at 8-ball so the game has very little secrets to me and I really know how to play properly in real life.
But obviously, this is a game on Nintendo Switch! So how does it fare compared to the real deal? Let me just say it was a horrible experience…
The part I love about the real deal, is that you can just go from pot to pot, you can just get into a flow and keep playing once you reach a certain level, but this game does just about everything right to break that flow, which, to be perfectly clear, is not a good thing at all! After you pot a ball, even though some balls are still rolling on the table, it ruins the momentum and it is not the only thing wrong.
For example, when your opponent misses a pot and scratches the white ball, you get hit with the delays in transition pretty badly and this is where it goes all out wrongly. There is not even an option to remove these interludes, annoying and distracting as they can be… The options are pretty much only there to adjust the audio and inverse the play direction. This game would really benefit from these screens being removed.
Another one of my grievances with this game, there are no real ways to avoid magical pots from happening by the computer. At one point, I was playing against the easiest of the computers, they just scored a three cushion plant, like it was nothing. I saw this repeated at least 4 times within a 1 hour period of playing. It misses the easiest of possible sinkers but the very hard ones are scored so easily. Consistency is something that is present in real life but apparently not in this game.
While it does hold true for the majority of billiard conventions like how to decide which player goes first, the rules are properly aligned into the game but that is about it for positive points.
I do not want to sound overly negative about this game, I just did not enjoy it at all. The center pockets seem like trenches, the computer scores damn near impossible shots the entire time as the difficulty goes up, making it an overall crappy experience.
The way the ball rolls on top of the cloth, another issue that is hard to neglect. I often felt the ball just kept rolling or stopped real fast. I know this is an indie game and not some sort of big-budget version, but some slight improvements could instantly raise the quality of gameplay in a game that really is disappointing in its current iteration.
In conclusion, I would recommend against buying this game. I really do. I had mostly a bad time while playing this game, the delays when screens pop up, the unnatural feeling of a pool table, no, I did not like this experience.
My rating is a mere 20%
