Pool Panic

Pool Panic excels at being exactly what it is, a weird puzzle adventure game with a lot of personality and plenty to do.

While the camera and a few other nagging issues can make things vexing at times, Pool Panic shines past the mild blemishes as it’s a dazzling display of artistic buffoonery. It’s hard to recommend for people that have to get the high score or complete every optional challenge, but if you just want to sit back and roll through a world with oodles of inventiveness and creativity, this is an acid trip worth taking.

Looking like a mash-up of the Mr. Men, Cuphead, and Rick & Morty, Pool Panic is a wonderfully anarchic work of 2D animation.

Pool Panic is a fun and original game for Nintendo Switch and, although it can be frustrating at times; its humor and lively style make anyone want to approach the pool table.

Pool Panic is a ridiculous and enjoyable game. Although it can be annoying at times, the overall amount of wacky fun you'll have within its trippy world far outweighs any frustration that you'll experience along the way.

Pool Panic is an absurd puzzle game that breathes new life into the game of pool despite some control issues.

Pool Panic is an unexpected take on the classic game of pool. Combining the weird and silliness of Adult Swim with a sports puzzler type game makes for fun and enjoyable gameplay. The art style and attention to detail work nicely, and adds an unexpected depth to this wacky game!

With its creativity in the pool ball variety and levels spread across a massive open-esque world, Pool Panic manages to be interesting all the way through.

I was impressed with its fresh and original vibe.

Well, obviously Pool Panic won’t please every player, for its visual style is… different, to say the least. But the others will enjoy its numerous challenges and its sense of humour.

Pool Panic is beautiful, weird, and clever in equal measure, but it may prove too frustrating for those who don't click with its vibe.

Pool Panic is wonderfully weird and so imaginative. While this probably won’t please those after something a little more traditional, its focus on physics-based puzzles is certainly an interesting take. Frustrating, lacking direction but with a world full of character and unique ideas, Pool Panic can be a really fun time albeit one that’s known to scratch every so often.

A wildly imaginative and vaguely psychedelic physics puzzler with a novel pool-based twist, Pool Panic is frequently thrilling and almost never boring, but it's also mechanically suspect and occasionally frustrating. In short, it has cult classic written all over it.

All in all, Pool Panic is a unique experience, though not for everybody. If you enjoy puzzle games packed with content, it may be worth your time. I never felt the desire to go back through and complete all the challenges for each stage–just wanted to get through to see what was next. Pool Panic is a fun and crazy game hampered by sometimes inaccurate or finicky controls and a lack of camera manipulation.

Featuring some fun and accessible challenges, the game also resorts to reusing the same elements a bit too much for its own good and in some of the areas, the gameplay is unnecessarily compromised by design flaws, which is a shame. Still, Pool Panic offers some good reasons to pick up and have a fun moments, more so on multiplayer.

Bizarre and interesting; perhaps the quintessential Adult Swim-published game in that respect, but ultimately this one is merely just a decent game that may be guilty of thinking being strange is the same as being funny. Pool Panic shows promise but is more surface than feeling. It’s great it exists, however, if only to prove that, yes, sometimes games are just plain weird, and it’s okay to embrace that.

Loaded with problems, dullness, and annoyances, Pool Panic didn’t grip me anywhere in a way I expected it to. It has a good idea, and with some more interesting level ideas in place, the game would have been an easy recommendation. Instead it just feels wasted. It’s flat and wears out its welcome before you’re even close to done with the 100+ levels. The nuggets of greatness can still be found, but they’re just too few and far between to really keep up the excitement that the title suggests.