Everybody knows that looks aren't everything. We also know that we're not to judge a book by its cover. This are very good philosophies and excellent values to be teaching the younger folk in society, yet however hard we try not to, every now and again we do it automatically. I did it with Pool Party - and I'm not proud of myself for that.

Pool Party arrived in a small brown Jiffy bag, as is standard for a review game. Excitedly, I ripped the packet open and slipped the contents out onto my desk, finding it all to be a bit of a blur. First I switched the light on to see if that was the issue. That didn't help, so I popped off my glasses and gave them a bit of a wipe. Something still wasn't right and, short of suddenly developing cataracts, I decided that the issue wasn't with me but with the front cover of Pool Party. It's out of focus, in simple terms. There's photograph - a group shot of three friends playing a game of pool - and while it looks at first glance as though one section of the photo is out of focus to draw emphasis to another, upon closer inspection, I found no in-focus area at all.

Feeling a little puzzled by this, I shelved this minor criticism as at best a misprint and at worst an oversight, and popped the disc into my Wii. I'm a pretty serious snooker player and have been known to make a little extra cash playing pool from time to time, so I was looking forward to getting to grips with a cue-sports sim, especially when I flicked through the game's manual and discovered that there were thirteen game modes on offer. Upon closer inspection, some of these are slight mutations of other game modes, for example 9-ball pool can also be played as Time Attack mode where the objective is to complete the game as quickly as possible, and straight pool (where regardless of numeric order or ball-type, you try to pot as many balls as you can, in the words of John Virgo) can also be played as Killer, where you lose a life for not potting a ball on any given shot and the first player to lose all their lives is out (much like playing HORSE on a basketball court). Some of these extra game variations seem a little pointless, though - in all my years of playing, I've never heard of anyone playing 10-ball pool, which is much the same as 9-ball pool (the American variety) but where the final ball is the number 10 ball rather than the number 9 ball. Admiration for the effort and I'm all for as much variety and as many modes of play as possible, but after trying a few of them out, nobody will be playing anything other than 8-ball, 9-ball and snooker.

Three hits out of thirteen seems like quite a slim success ratio. Scattergun is the best way I can describe it, a term that applies throughout Pool Party, in particular when selecting your mode of play. You choose your game type (or variation on an actual game) and are taken to the environment select screen - fairly standard fare for most games nowadays. You get to customise what backdrop you play against, what colour baize is on the table, what type of cue you want to use and even what music is playing in the background. This is a nice idea in principle, but aside from a setting that dictates the roll speed of the table, none of these serve to vary the way the game plays. If anything, they all add up to annoy you more, the sum of a great annoying whole - a dingy alleyway location with flickering fluorescent strips, plus a gaudy coloured table and a dodgy techno soundtrack hurt your head very, very quickly. What's worse, you cannot default these settings to favourites so that the game remembers them - if you manage to isolate the one song that doesn't make you want to chew your own ears off (a thirty-second acoustic guitar instrumental a la Jack Johnson that unfortunately is so short that even its looping grates after a while) you have to go through all the fiddly options with a twitchy cursor every time.

Most frustratingly of all though, for all the options and choices you have that are completely pointless and superficial, there is no option for setting the length of the match. If you want to play a best of three then you have to go through all the menus again for each new game. Want to play more than a best of three? Best keep a pen and paper handy, because no match length setting means there's no score-keeping either. Unfortunately there's frustration aplenty when you actually begin playing as well, which comes in three forms - the graphics, the sound, and the gameplay. Oh dear.

First up are the graphics - not by any means the worst thing you'll ever see, I'll grant Pool Party that, but just like the front cover, there's something not quite right about them. Upon examining the most important area of any cue-sports game - the table - everything looks quite nice. The cloth is green, the balls are shiny, and there are markings on the bed of the table essential to the game. The 3D-rendered environments are quite imaginative and detailed too, if a little unnecessary and over the top in places. So far, everything's fairly standard. Strike a few shots though and watch the little glass spheres do what they do best - roll around, bounce off the cushions, and collide with each other - and you'll realise they're not actually spheres at all. They do not roll, or bounce, or kiss with a gentle clack. They are in fact sprites of the second dimension, not balls of the third. There are a few dead giveaways for this. Firstly, the lighting effects are completely static (the highlights and shine on the top of the balls do not move at all), secondly, they do not interact with the cushions properly (if a ball gets too close to a cushion that's between the ball and the camera then it sits 'on top' of the cushion in the viewing order, rather than nestling under it), and thirdly, there's a whopping great black outline around them!

Aside from the aforementioned awful music (a headache-inducing blend of techno, jazz, funk and metal - all those awful bits of menu and incidental music from arcades of yore, mashed together into loops so short that even if you don't hate it first time out, you soon will), the sound really shows up just how poor it is with the effects. The clicking of balls meeting is fine and, where a pool game is concerned, that's really all you need. The problem occurs when the developers either tried to get a bit clever or have been really, really stupid (or a combination of the two). If someone commits a foul, the game certainly lets you know - a description of the foul committed pops up, flashing between yellow and red at an epilepsy-inducing rate, accompanied by a siren as loud and harsh as that of a POW camp. Pot a ball and you'll get a small smattering of applause, which is nice in principle but adds about five seconds onto every shot and just gets plain annoying after the second or third repetition. The most heinous of these sound effects though is the ding-ding of a bell, boxing style, every single time it becomes the next player's turn. This is pointless, irritating, and spectacularly amateurish. It feels as though it's a programming student's first project and in the absence of any creativity when it comes to sound, they've raided a cheesy effects archive and thrown them all in. It's painful every time you (or your opponent) come to take a shot and exacerbated when playing snooker, when rather than registering that it is the same player's turn while on a break (red-colour-red-colour-red…) you get that stupid round of applause and cringe-worthy boxing bell for every single shot, even if you were to make a maximum break of 147 (that's thirty-seven shots total, all punctuated by the infuriating bell).

Not that you're going to be scoring any maximums in this game; for all the presentation flaws (and there are so, so many), good gameplay can save a game that's all but dead in the water. Not this time, though. Not Pool Party. Twitchy controls, crazy physics and some of the dullest AI I've ever come across all play their part in truly sinking this dismal ship.

You'll need the manual on hand to fathom the controls with this one. It was obviously designed with the Wii in mind but it doesn't really make a lot of sense. You have to play with the nunchuk attached to the Wiimote, which is fine, except that the nunchuk isn't the best way to play and if you want to control the game differently you still need the nunchuk attached (and probably hanging limp around your ankles, getting in the way as you'll find that two hands on the Wiimote helps). To aim your shot you can choose from three methods: push the analog stick on the nunchuk, press the d-pad on the Wiimote, or point the Wiimote at the screen and waggle to rotate. The analog stick is too fast and under-sensitive, the Wiimote waggle is erratic at best (completely chaotic at worst) and the d-pad is a touch oversensitive, but the best of a bad bunch. From there you hold down the B button, which brings up a gauge to set the power - fairly standard for cue-sports games - then after setting the power with the analog stick or d-pad, thrust the Wiimote forward as a cue to take the shot. I see two main issues with this. Firstly, what's the point of using the Wiimote as a cue to go forwards with the shot if you don't use it to pull back and set the power (as in the Wii Sports games and other sports titles, making full use of the motion sensitivity)? And secondly, the shot-making motion is pretty unreliable - if you lean over forwards and swing the Wiimote through in a pendulum motion (mimicking the real action of a pool cue) you'll rarely, if ever, actually complete a shot. The only real way to push the cue through is with a sort of short-armed knife stab straight towards the screen. Good for letting out some aggression (probably against the people who developed Pool Party), but not so good for actually playing pool.

Navigating the menus is down to Wiimote pointing, as is fairly usual for every Wii title nowadays. The onscreen cursor is just as twitchy as using the Wiimote to aim your shots though and as such is incredibly infuriating, given that you cannot use any button presses to make any selections. This is particularly problematic when nominating a ball in snooker, as you'll think that you selected one colour, then get down and take your shot, only to play a foul shot because the target object ball changed when you happened to accidentally point the Wiimote at a different ball in the process of aiming your shot. Adding spin too is very hit and miss due to poorly thought-out controls. You first have to hold down the 1 button, then choose where you're going to strike the cueball by either dragging a targeting cursor around with the Wiimote (just as wild and lairy as the cursor control before) or placing your other hand on the Wiimote and using the d-pad to move the target (awkward because you cannot toggle the spin with a press of the 1 button, you need to hold it to make the changes, thus tying up one hand and leading you to have to drop the nunchuk and use the other to actually set the spin).

The spin itself is just as random as the control method, as you'll find that adding even a slightest bit of side spin to the cueball throws your targeting line off by about sixty degrees from the straight and narrow. Applying sidespin to the cueball does have this effect in real life, but not to quite the same degree. To get the amount of swerve on the cueball that Pool Party applies in normal circumstances, you'd have to have the cue-butt raised about eighty degrees in the air and be playing a masse shot. This probably makes some people feel like they're Tom Cruise in The Colour of Money but makes actually playing with any spin nigh-on impossible, and as someone who plays virtually every shot in real life with some degree of spin, side, check, stun, backspin or run-through, I found myself just hitting every shot dead ball to avoid the rigmarole of adding spin and the crazy effects it has. The rest of the physics are just as insane as the spin - I've played shots at such an angle that the cueball should run around the angles and hit half a dozen cushions, but instead it almost runs further than straight on, following the object ball towards its pocket. Sometimes the balls slide across the table, carrying absolutely no speed and by rights having stopped some six feet previously, and other times they sit in the black space above a pocket as though they're being repulsed by some magnetic force.

Your computer opponents are just as random as the physics of the game. It's akin to playing pool with a hyperactive bear with a blindfold on - shots are slammed around the table at high speed and the game even eschews balls that are sitting squarely in the middle of the pocket to attempt to pot a ball off eight cushions. You can forgive it for having no semblance of a concept of safety, a very difficult concept to teach to a player, never mind to program (even a lot of the better players struggle to get their heads around anything but potting) but not being able to see an easy shot that's right in front of them is criminally stupid. Even more comically, if you do manage to control the slippery roll of the table to lay your opponent in a snooker or some sort of tight spot, they spend a while thinking about it. A good, long while. You get a percentage timer that seems to be operating in Microsoft minutes (those progression bars you get whenever Windows is performing some operation that it said would take an hour three weeks ago and still apparently has an hour to go) telling you how close to deciding on their shot they are, but after three or four seconds at the bottom of the screen a prompt flashes up saying press A to break. Intrigued by this, I pressed A to see what would happen. This literally breaks your opponent's train of thought and makes them play whatever shot it seems they were considering at the time, so not only does the AI have soggy cardboard for brains, you can even prevent it from playing a halfway clever shot by sabotaging its thought process (which is often very amusing and highly explosive but if you can only beat an opponent with all the pool-ability of a turnip by cheating, then shame on you!)

Pool Party isn't pretty, it doesn't sound nice and it definitely isn't clever. Aside from the obvious fact that World Championship Snooker is the best cue-sports game around at the moment, not only do I genuinely believe that the original incarnation of Virtual Pool circa 1996 is infinitely better than this, I personally would rather be playing an online portable pool game such as Yahoo! Pool, which while only being 2D and top-down, plays a much truer game and is a lot more fun. Apart from anything else, even if by some strange fluke you'd heard that Pool Party was worth a look, or perhaps you'd never heard of it and the name grabbed your attention standing sideways on the shelf in a games shop, when you take it down from the shelf and see how amateurish the front cover is, that should be a big clue that the rest of the game is just as poor. Judging a book by its cover isn't a good thing, but it might just stop you wasting thirty quid in this instance.

Reviewed by Tom Baines for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).