Scratch City Pool 3D
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| Scratch City Pool 3D

Whether it's snooker, hockey, cricket, billiards or an episode of Jackass, entertainment in the form of hitting balls with sticks is as old as mankind itself. Pool, in particular, has become known as the game for so-called "working" class Americans. You know the type who reside in neon-lit bars where the women are loose, the fights frequent and the regulars sit hunched by the bar, peeling labels off their bottles of Bud – all of which might explain why Starbucks got so popular!

It's precisely this atmosphere (the neon-lit bar, not the barista-staffed coffee house) that Scratch City Pool 3D tries to recreate and to be fair it does a pretty good job.

A room full of jukeboxes, dart-boards and friendly women forms an appealing backdrop to your snazzy 3D table (albeit more 1980s trendy Nu Yoik than smoke-filled downtown Detroit). Even the comparatively basic sound (consisting mainly of a generic theme tune and 'canned' beeping as the balls hit each other) fails to detract from the overall ambience and the characters you play as (or against) fit the scene well.

As befitting folk who spend their time in pool hall the AI competitors are rather tough nuts to crack (certainly on the latter of four difficulty levels – on novice they're just plain 'nuts', and we won our first few games by default!). Fortunately there's a raft of options allowing you to take on human opponents including 'party play' (two-players on one device), Bluetooth or even online via mForma's M-Server. The latter is a really nice touch and adds an extra element to the game, as does the ability to wager dead presidents on the outcome of a match (although this, like the cursory trick shot mode do feel a little like bolted-on extras)

Sadly, the effort expended on creating an atmosphere and setting up ample multiplayer options seems to have been at the expense of some rather more fundamental matters.

As with any pool or snooker game, the movement and behaviour of the balls is fairly critical. Being able to leave a ball in the right place is essential for retaining control of the table and in Scratch City Pool 3D this proves to be as easy as winning a game of Twister against an Octopus on the floor of the Pacific. Such is the fiddly nature of judging power and angles with this game. The 3D table may look lovely as you smoothly spin it around zooming in and out and changing elevation, but trying to find the precise angle for even routine shots can be a struggle (even the supposedly precise controls offered by '4' and '6' buttons can't always help).

Combine this with a very fickle power metre, an overly sensitive spin system, and the odd gravitational forces that occasionally seem to encourage balls to stick together and the result is that you can rarely be entirely confident of your shots. Even the usually reliable 'aiming line' option is incredible skittish at the best of times. At others (such as shots played along the cushion) it's just plain wrong.

Granted, the top-down view does make life a little easier, but this sort of defeats the point and besides if you wanted a 2D-pool game there are far better options available (Gameloft's Midnight Pool springs readily to mind).

Ultimately if you're more fussed about showing off your phone's 3D capabilities than getting complete control of your cue, this isn't a terrible bet and there's certainly entertainment to be had here thanks to the multiplayer features (at least your human competitors have the same control issues as you!). However, more discerning connoisseurs of the cue ball should probably look elsewhere for their ballistic thrills.

Scratch City Pool 3D

A good-looking game with an innovative multiplayer mode, Scratch City Pool fouls up over basic physics
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