Nine-ball Roulette offers both 8-ball and 9-ball for up to four players.
The gimmick is a six-shot revolver, with one bullet fired after you lose a frame. Thankfully, players don't pass around the same gun, so it isn't entirely luck-based. Instead, everyone has their own revolver, giving you a 1/6 chance of being killed after each loss. Survive, and you play again while keeping that existing 16% chance and adding another 1/6 for every subsequent defeat. Sooner or later, your luck will run out.
At the end of the day, it's still pool, and it plays as a very close approximation of the real thing. It feels great when you're clearing tables, and equally awful when you somehow miss a sitter. The controls are simple, making good use of the mouse to control shot power. The audio feedback is excellent too, with balls striking together with a satisfying crack before dropping into the pocket with a reassuring slonk.
A lot of credit goes to how lightweight everything is. It should run on almost anything, and matchmaking is quick, with games taking only moments to set up and join. A few glitches crop up now and then, usually when someone has a poor connection, but overall it's a smooth experience. There's also a practice mode if you just want to play solo.
The Russian roulette mechanic is both a blessing and a curse. You can beat someone who's completely dominating you, or lose to someone who can barely pot a ball. That's especially true in 9-ball, where a lucky finish can end the match before the better player has much chance to recover.
8-ball is somewhat pointless with more than two players, as everyone else has to wait for one of the current players to be eliminated. In theory, they could survive ten games before that happens.
Because the game handles cueing for you, people attempt outrageous shots they simply couldn't pull off in real life. Locking someone tight against the cushion, a perfectly legitimate tactic in real pool, means very little here. That's fine in itself, but experienced players quickly learn to exploit the game's quirks. They'll play jump shots over balls that would be physically impossible to clear, or make the cue ball jump from positions where no jump shot exists and somehow the ball will jump.
Hit-and-hope shots work far too often. I don't just mean people getting lucky. Something feels off with the physics. Balls seem to rebound from cushions at improbably perfect angles or somehow shape themselves into ideal positions. Even if you miss the double, hitting it hard enough often seems to produce the triple or even the quadruple instead.
I've occasionally seen players with no shot timer start losing, then simply wait in the hope their opponent gets bored and quits. Thankfully, that's rare. Far more common are the players with seemly undiagnosed ADHD, who seem incapable of sitting still. They'll constantly type in chat, throw objects, ping the table, clap, or jitter around in front of your shot in an attempt to distract you. I thought it was just one person at first, but if you play enough, you'll see the same behaviour almost every day.
I play by a personal gentleman's code that nobody else seems to follow. If my opponent runs out of time, or accidentally nudges the cue ball a few centimetres while trying to feather a shot, I'll often deliberately pot the cue ball to hand the turn back. That generosity is thrown back in my face. Rather than recreating the shot they missed, they'll happily take ball in hand, thank me in chat, and clear the table. My own fault, perhaps, for expecting fair play.
There's almost always someone from China online, so finding a match is rarely a problem regardless of the time of day.
I'd like to see an option for English-style red and yellow balls in 8-ball. I'm also surprised there no Killers mode, as it feels like an obvious for this type of game.
