Hustle Kings

The first thing that comes to mind when you see Hustle Kings on the PlayStation Store is: Why? Isn't it commercial suicide to sell a pool game on a platform that comes with one free? It's akin to selling water to a fish.

Fortunately for VooFoo Studios, Hustle Kings is far better than pool in Home even before you've gotten to the main menu. Unlike Home, it's in full HD.

The gameplay, controls and visuals get off to a good start with an in-game tutorial that gets you into the meat of what makes Hustle Kings special namely, the look, physics and currency. The more difficult the shot, the more its worth. Successive shots are worth more too, so if you manage to clean up on the break, you'll get a lot more money out of a match than if you played a gentlemanly back-and-forth with your opponent.

The visuals are beautiful. If you switch to the ball camera during play and zoom in, you can see the minute scratches on the balls and the fibres of the baize, not to mention the reflections of the arena and other balls being visible on the surface of each ball. The arenas too are outstanding, going from something that wouldn't look out of place in Mass Effect, to an Art Deco cocktail bar with a city view out the window.

Moving onto Career mode, here you play for money against AI opponents and complete challenges in different types of pool, mainly US 8-ball and 9-ball. Before long it'll cost you in-game credits to play a match, with the reward normally being double the buy in. This means you'll have to actually get better to progress, rather than simply beating the game by attrition. This is also due to the AI upping the difficulty levels considerably.

You're also encouraged to curve or jump the ball to get out of tricky spots. In fact, each level in career mode has a couple of trick shots to complete, e.g. Jump over a ball to pot another, do a roll-back to hit the ball you jumped over, pot both and the other ball on the table. It really is all about the hustle.

If you want a little less pressure, there's always multiplayer. Playing locally with a friend on the couch is probably best, since trash talking is so much more effective when accompanied by body language. There's a certain twisted satisfaction to be had from the expression of a defeated opponent. There is online too. The nature of the game means that any lag usually goes unnoticed, or can't adversely affect play at least.

Chalking is very important in Hustle Kings, improving accuracy as it does. You get the standard chalk for free, but if you want one of the other three, which have varying effects, they're 20p each. That puts the "micro-" in micro-transaction sure, but it seems like they should just be part of the game. Especially when the game has some between game advertising; ads for WipEout HD Fury and PSP minis can be seen on the load screens and in menus. Thankfully, there are no ads in your face during play.

All in all, a great little game. Especially for under a fiver. That's more value than you can shake a cue at.