I’ve always been a fan of pool growing up, even though I’ve never had a table of my own, I’d take advantage of every opportunity I had to play whenever I came across one. This extended to my PC of course, as I was an avid player of the classic, Virtual Pool. So I was looking forward to trying out Pure Pool to sort of rekindle those memories. While it’s a good start at first glance and certainly an improvement over past offerings, there’s definitely a lot lacking in this package and some glaring omissions and issues.

To start off with, the game kept crashing in the beginning when trying to take me into the tutorial mode upon starting it the first time. I ultimately had to forgo the tutorial in order to proceed. Not a promising beginning for the game, and searches online seem to corroborate my experience with others experiencing random crashes. Fortunately those were the only ones I experienced so they didn’t affect my actual gameplay at least, and I was able to start a tutorial session through the menu afterwards. Hopefully these get patched out later because it’s simply intolerable for a console title in particular. Secondly the features of the game are pretty bare bones. You have an offline mode where you can play against different levels of AI in a single game or tournament, but there’s only 8 ball, 9 ball, and a couple extra game types that aren’t really “pure” called Killer and Accumulator. The former involves playing with 3 “lives” which deplete when you fail to pot a ball and replenish when you sink more than one into a pocket. The latter involves potting 15 balls in numerical order with the number of each ball indicating the score earned for putting it in the pocket. There’s also a four challenges you can play with a global leaderboard mostly consisting of measuring your speed and efficiency in clearing a table. Unfortunately there’s no trick shot mode in this game where you could try out some crazy things like jumping the cue ball or curling it around a rack.

Once you’re on the table, Pure Pool plays fairly competently, with believable physics and solid controls for the most part. You use the left analog to aim, the right analog to control the stroke of your cue, and the face buttons to tweak the spin or add a little more precise aiming. In amateur mode you will get some path prediction for both the cue ball and the first ball it hits, but it will do a nice job of adding a little margin of error to trickier shots so you can’t just cheat with it. My only complaint is that it can be tricky to bank shots off the walls of the table with the first person angle you’re limited to. You can hold the square button to stand up and get more of a look around but as soon as you let go you’re back to the same limited view that leaves you completely guessing as to what’s behind you or off to the side. The AI is fairly cheap even on Amateur setting. Even though I was able to beat it a fair amount of the time, it felt like I was watching a pro dominate the table by making several shots straight before sandbagging and deliberately missing a shot to turn it over to me. It just wasn’t believable, and I imagine the harder difficulties must be completely unforgiving of mistakes. I’m not sure whether it was PSN issues or game issues, but the multiplayer was a bit flaky to get working at times, and when the matchmaking worked, it was quite uneven. It even makes the obvious error of pitting Amateur players, with visual assists and all, against Pro and Master players which have none of them, clearly quite unfair.

At the very least however, Pure Pool does nail the aesthetics. The game is quite appealing visually and looks like you’ve stepped into very classy bar, and the table itself is photorealistically textured. I’d say the balls might be a little too shiny but maybe they’re just brand new. The background music is understated enough to provide the right ambiance without getting annoying as it loops, and the sound effects of the collisions on the table are satisfying to listen to as you pot balls left and right.

If you’re looking to slow down and relax, maybe get away from all the violence and shooting you’ve been doing on your PS4 (or PC, and soon to be on Xbox One), Pure Pool can be a soothing change of pace. However if you’re looking for a full fledged pool sim in the vein of Virtual Poo, you might be a bit disappointed, but at the price of a download game, it’s hard to complain too much.

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