| Author | Review |
|---|
Spellers
41,142
TA Score for this game: 564
Posted on 15 May 12 at 15:56 |
This review has 6 positive votes and 0 negative votes. Please log in to vote. |
Snooker games have always managed to capture a decent fan base and the WSC series is no exception to this. Blade are now moving into their 9th year for this series, although due to the timing of their releases not their 9th game (2006 was missed and 2008 was the wii only version of this game).
As with most sporting series that have gone on for this long the core experience of the game feels refined and well thought out. The controls are reasonably intuitive and with a mixture of the arrows to show the directions of balls and the shadow that shows the area the cue ball is expected to finish allow the user the ability to emulate their ball potting heroes with relative ease.
The game also comes with a career mode which will see you starting as a lowly ranked rookie and building your way up to the no.1 rank winning officially licensed tournaments as you go. Add to this the points/skill progression given for winning matches and you will gradually build a brand new star of the game for yourself.
The AI for this game is interesting, it is clear they have tried to not only give an illusion of risk calculating but also giving different players slightly different characteristics in how they approach the game and the levels of risk they will undertake. This adds to the complex nature of the game where good safety is rewarded and a mistake is punished in equal measure. Early on in your career you'll find the game is fairly forgiving, your early opponents will rarely score more than a break of 30 giving you ample opportunities to defeat them. This doesn't last however and as you progress from qualifiers into the real tournaments the difficulty ramps up significantly to the point where it often feel saftey is not a valid option be the likes of Ronnie o'Sullivan will pot anything they can see meaning you have to match them to stand a realistic chance. This can be a bit frustrating and feel somewhat unbalanced especially for those who like the tactical nature of the game.
The commentary for the game I found very difficult to get on with, you will often find john Virgo and Steve Davis making polar opposite comments about the same shot, this i felt detracts from the game experience a little but considering it is only really window dressing doesn't effect the game too badly.
There is one major glaring issue that surrounds this game and that is the loading times, whilst the matches are near seamless apart from saving between frames any and all other parts of the game are plagued by loading times that would be more at home with the commodore 64. I was left feeling that this is something that really shouldn't have been such an issue, there has been some effort to add in needless animations between menu sections and this really became a serious sticking point in what otherwise was a fairly solid outing.
For snooker fans the gaming experience is good however you will find that as you play more you will begin to discard safety play as potting balls from almost any angle is possible due to the trajectory arrows. Anyone who has played the previous games in the series should not expect to see any ground breaking changes. But I feel everyone who plays this will feel that the menus navigation is painful to work with and really hurts the game badly and drags it from being a decent title into mediocrity.
 |