Subpar Pool
Variety comes at a price
iOS, Android, Switch, PC
$4.99-$9.99
Endless
Subpar Pool is a puzzle game where you hit balls into pockets on irregularly-shaped tables. You could call it a cross between pool and minigolf, though that doesn’t do justice to its oddities.
Each game takes place on a “run” of five procedurally-generated tables, each with one or more pockets along the edges or in the middle.
You begin by placing your white ball anywhere on the table, then dragging on the screen to aim. A line shows the direction of your shot, with more lines showing post-collision trajectory with other balls. Unlike other golf games, you don’t shoot your white ball as soon as you finish aiming; instead, you double-tap the screen. This makes it possible to aim regardless of the table configuration because dragging anywhere on the screen rotates your aim rather than pointing it at (or away from) where you’re touching.
This admittedly fussy description of Subpar Pool’s controls highlights how it doesn’t have the same kind of intuitive one-to-one manipulation as other touchscreen games like Angry Birds, where you pull back on a slingshot and release it to fire. This isn’t a bad thing: separating aiming from firing enables a broader arrangements of targets. In Angry Birds, everything you’re aiming at is to one side, whereas in Subpar Pool you aim at targets at every range and direction. It also enables much more precise control. This makes it a true puzzle game, for better and for worse.
(There is a very cool bit of design where, if you move the white ball after aiming, the aiming will remain “locked on” to the original target. This lets you experiment with placement so you can make the white ball go in a useful direction to set up the next shot.)
You can shoot while balls are still in motion. Everything slows to a crawl as you drag to aim, making things a little harder than if time paused. I didn’t do this very much, partly because I found it a bit annoying to precisely aim shots. If I wanted to glance off another ball, I’d have to wobble my finger back and forth just to get the perfect oblique angle. I get why Subpar Pool wants to keep things simple rather than having a secondary fine-grained aiming system, but this is where I started getting confused about how skill-based this game is meant to be.
In some ways, Subpar Pool doesn’t care about skill. Nothing bad happens if your white ball ends up in a pocket; it just removes the “flawless” status from that table, which usually doesn’t mean anything. In fact, it can be useful to pocket yourself as you get to freely place the white ball again. Similarly, while each table has a different par number, representing how many shots you have to clear it, here’s what would happen if a table had a par of 3 and you:
Cleared the table with 1 or 2 shots: “Subpar” score (nothing special happens)
Cleared with 3 shots: “Par” score (ditto)
Cleared with 4 shots: “Bogey” score (ditto)
Didn’t clear with 4 shots: Lose one of your two lives; any remaining balls are turned black and moved to the next table to clutter things up and remind you of your failure. If you pocket them, you’ll lose “flawless” status; if you clear a table and there are still black balls remaining, they’ll just vanish.
Subpar Pool looks and feels chill, too. The balls bob and sway to the music and chirp things like “last shot!”. The white ball elongates when you shoot it; colourful floral patterns sit behind bleached-bright rasterised table graphics. It’s very charming and distinctive. But this “we’re just having fun” vibe is at odds with the game’s unforgiving progression mechanics, which absolutely demand skill, or more precisely, skill and luck. You begin with a single table style (“world”) to play, with normal balls and normal behaviour. Unlocking the game’s three more interesting worlds and many gameplay variations and different ball types requires completing challenges.
Challenges can be trivially easy, like completing a single run of a world, or pocketing eight balls across multiple runs. Others can be infuriatingly hard, like repeatedly pocketing a ball using another ball, or pocketing multiple balls in a single shot. At the start, I failed a pair of challenges five times in a row, meaning I had to repeat the same setup for 25 tables.
This was so disheartening I was considering abandoning the game entirely. One stick challenge involved sinking three “long shots” in a single run, but it was never clear how long a long shot had to be, and worse, the procedurally-generated tables meant it was completely random whether I’d be presented with a setup that would even make long shots possible. I was relieved, if still annoyed, when the game became easier as I completed more challenges.
Complete a few challenges unlocks new worlds or “cards” to modify runs. When you start a run, you select a world along with modifier cards like:
Hunter: Adds balls that home in on your white ball
Chonker: Larger, slower balls
Crystal: Balls that can be cracked and destroyed
Locker: Immovable balls that can only be dragged around by their connection to other normal balls
Fast Run: You only have a few seconds to aim per table
Fixed Start: The white ball can’t be freely placed at the start of tables
More Space: Tables are bigger
No Bounce Line: Aiming lines show less information
and so on. The further you get in the game, the more cards you can apply to a run at the same time. Challenges are attached to worlds and cards, encouraging you to select several cards on a single run so you can knock a few off at once.
This is, however, not a good idea, because generally speaking, the game gets harder the more cards you apply. A game with Fixed Start, Fast Run, No Bounce Line, and More Space will be punishingly hard to complete, especially if you’re trying to do something like pocket multiple balls in a single shot. Accordingly, being good at Subpar Pool means figuring how what combination of cards and worlds will make it the easiest to complete a particular challenge.
For example, the Gateways world adds portals and much bigger holes to tables. This makes it a prime candidate for any challenge requiring pocketing lots of balls at once. I completed that one plus “Cut off connections to Lockers 8 times” in my first try since Lockers make it easy to drag groups of balls around together.
Subpar Pool is at its best when modifiers interact in interesting ways. It didn’t take long to discover that the best way to pocket Hunter balls was to pocket myself (the white ball) and have the Hunters follow me in. Even though the designer undoubtedly planned for this, it’s deeply fun and satisfying to feel like you’ve discovered a shortcut.
A couple of hours in, as more challenges and tables were unlocked, I started knocking out one or two challenges every run. While they were easier, not all were fun. On the Links world, the hole moved every time I pocked a ball, with a shadow showing where it was moving next. This sounds fun but was quite annoying given I never figured out how to exploit the mechanic. The same goes for the conveyor belts on the Belts world, which made it hard to get the timing of shots right.
You’d think I’d hate the Fast Run modifier, then, but I loved it. Rather than giving you a fixed amount of time per table, you get a fixed amount of time to move and aim, meaning that as long as you aren’t touching the screen, you can take as much time as you like. It’s a pleasing mixture of thinking and rushing, and the time pressure reduces the impulse (and need) to perfect shots. I’m surprised Subpar Pool doesn’t use timers more, but again, I think the designer wanted to make a puzzle game, which is a shame since it would’ve made for a killer action/puzzle game.
It took me four hours to unlock every world and modifier card (there’s also an option to unlock everything at any time). I didn’t feel any urge to continue playing, though: the aforementioned fiddliness and randomness made for unpleasantly wild difficulty swings. This sounds like I’m putting the game on blast, but I’m really not – we just need to step away from the notion that games need endless gameplay. Subpar Pool was perfectly entertaining for the $4.99 I paid for it on iOS. Not even ten years ago, we’d think it was a miracle of a mobile game.
I’ve always thought the problem with turning pool into a video game is that by making it more accessible with guides and “bounce lines”, you make it too boring and predictable. Subpar Pool’s many worlds and modifiers and procedurally-generated tables introduce impressive variety but subpar consistency.