Wukong's Pool Reviews

Coming from Rack and Slay, this feels like the more skillful, less zany brother of the roguelike/lite pool games. Very clean and well executed, the myriad of trick shots required (or carefully planned power ups, if you're lucky and careful) combined with the random targeting of each card means that there's quite a nice skill ceiling to approach, and I believe this game makes it easy to come back and replay over and over. A few annoyances/issues: a) There are a few translation issues; the biggest one is calling the playing cards "Pokers" as if it was a noun, especially as one of the first things the player experiences, did not give me the right first impression, but luckily there's not much text involved. However... b) I wish there were more/different power ups you could get; it seems like, if you simply play well up to a certain point, you will be able to get the powerups to make all cards in hand the same value and have the same success condition, which you can get down to a two turn cooldown. This is powerful, as the end game conditions can be mighty difficult to achieve; you can always get this by simply playing in a run for long enough. To that end, watering down the powerup pool with different things (hence tempting players/by pure luck, preventing players from just cheesing the end game) would be great. Regardless, it seems that one full run will allow you to get basically all the powerups, which feels a little boring. But the game is like $6 normally, so this would be quite a bit of a stretch anyway. Otherwise, I think the core of this game is great, and it's worth asking price; at the time of writing, it's on a 50% sale! If you're a 2d pool fan, what are you reading this review for? Go buy this game!