Review: Midnight Pool 3D

Midnight Pool is no new contender, it was released on the good old 6630 and many other older Symbian devices. I remember playing this game on the good old 6630 I used to own and I loved it. The graphics were fantastic, the sound was great too and the game play was addictive but that was nearly 3 years ago and it’s released again, were our expectations met? Is it improved? Or is it the Snakes: Subsonic Story all over again? Read on….

My first impressions of the game were Midnight Pool 3D? I remember this game from time ago so I was hopeful seeing as I loved the original I was soon to be disappointed – I looked at screenshots and it looked identical to the original, and I was in denial I was really trying to work out what was new to the game – It soon dawned on me. Nothing.

We start off with the usual Game loft loading bar, and we are presented with the menu, which is identical to the classic – even the same music background, this made my initial thoughts correct – It’s the same in everyway. This is a fatal mistake.

The aim of the game is to choose a character, and make that character the best Pool player there is through a story mode, seems simple enough and easy enough – but you will find the game gets boring very easily and you wont have the patience to do so. Only the hardcore pool players may see this through, or the point’s addicts

The game does have a challenges mode, which does make the game that little bit more fun, not that much though.

The game starts in landscape, but for some odd reason they didn’t design the game to be in this way with the controls seeing as everything you need to do requires you to input one of the number keys which makes this game being in landscape pointless. The graphics however are mediocre but even these haven’t changed since the early days, effectively these are just up scaled graphics.

The sound aspect, this sounded good 3 years ago to a certain extent – now its 2008 and our devices are capable by standard to accept audio not MIDI, and Stereo sound too yet no N-Gage developer has rolled out a high quality stereo sounding game, but Gameloft defiantly took it to the lowest with there crude version of “Sweet Alabama”.

The multiplayer aspect is once again Rankings, but the only way you can upload the rankings you achieve is right at the end of completing the game with a character which is fair enough but we should have a blue tooth option here and even Real time multiplayer over the Arena network.

Overall the game is not that good at all – Maybe fun for the new people who haven’t played the original, stick with Micro pool the Symbian alternative, at least it’s updated. I think where Game loft have gone wrong is the same way EA went wrong, they release there annual game (Asphalt 1, 2, 3) etc and think because it has the name it will sell. This hurt EA’s reputation, future N-gage titles from Game loft that follow this suit will also harm Game lofts reputation.

Buy this game if you love pool, but don’t expect too much from it and be warned of the price being £8.