Pool Panic

I sat down expecting a quirky puzzle game and ended up spending an evening chasing bear balls around a graveyard while a skeleton ball grew stilts to dodge my shots. That is Pool Panic in a nutshell: a top-down, 2.5D billiards-action-puzzle hybrid where you play as a cue ball with legs, rolling through a cartoon overworld and potting over 100 levels worth of animated, living pool balls that very much do not want to be pocketed. Red balls tremble and run. Yellow ones sprint away. Green goalies block your line. Grizzly bear balls charge at you. Each ball type is essentially its own mechanical puzzle, and the game keeps introducing new ones at a pace that genuinely surprises. The structure is simple: clear all the colored balls, then sink the 8-ball and yourself to finish the level. You move the cue ball freely around the table, aim with the right stick, and choose between a power shot or a soft finesse shot - there is a visible aim line to help you plot angles. On top of a basic clear, each level has four optional trophy objectives: finish under a set time, finish under a shot limit, clear every ball, and avoid scratching. Completionists will find real teeth here; casual players can just barrel through and see what absurdity comes next. The Panic Mode - a randomly seeded, time-attack endless mode - unlocks early and adds good replay value on its own. A post-launch update also dropped full local co-op into the story mode for up to four players, plus a VS Arena with dedicated competitive rounds including a motorcycle mayhem mode and a last-ball-standing candle-melting bout. Here is the honest problem: the camera is bad. It sits at a fixed 2.5D angle that makes judging secondary collisions genuinely annoying, and the controls, while not complex, feel slippery when precision is required. Some levels lean hard into adventure-game logic - no visible balls, environments you have to poke at to reveal hidden targets - and the game does almost nothing to explain what is actually being asked of you. The four trophy objectives are not even described in plain text; you are expected to reverse-engineer them from vague icons. That kind of hand-off approach works fine in a 5-minute level, but it accumulates into mild frustration across 100-plus stages. The single-player solo run sits in the 5-10 hour range, which is about right for what the game is asking. As someone who usually comes to games for the competitive online angle, I will be straight with you: there is no online multiplayer here. The VS Arena and co-op are local-only, which means this is a couch game, full stop. On a couch with the right people it punches above its weight - the chaos is genuinely funny in person. Solo, it is a pleasant, occasionally brilliant, occasionally tedious collection of weird ideas. The art style reads like an Adult Swim short run through a hand-drawn filter, which is either appealing or annoying depending on your tolerance for deliberate weirdness. Steam user reviews sit at Very Positive across a small sample, and critic scores averaged around 7 out of 10, which feels accurate: a game that is good at being strange but not always disciplined enough to be great.

Fred · Scout Team

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