Dead cushions, chalkless chewed up cues, beer stained cloths and the odd fight over the rules. This is what you might expect to find at the pool table down your local boozer, but no longer do you have to suffer these inconveniences. Simply place Pool Paradise in the drive of your PS2 and immaculate tables are yours to enjoy.

You begin the game with a visit to the loan shark for some stake money. This isn’t anything be concerned with as the cash never has to be repaid. The aquatic inhabitant is all in keeping with the paradise environment in which the game is based; some distant tropical island where the sun shines and beer flows freely. The music and background noise follows the theme, and although there isn’t much variety, the aural experience doesn’t become galling. The setting doesn’t have any relevance to the gameplay; it simply seems like an excuse to have tables in exotic locations.

Initially the available game modes are fairly limited; practice, tournament, trick shots and options. The first thing you should do is turn off the additional animations in the preferences; these add little to the experience and extend the time between visits to the table.

Entering a tournament means choosing which opponent you want to play. Your rivals, such as OJ Stumptsem and Pete Za Cutter, increase in difficulty the higher up the rankings you climb. You must stump up some cash in order to play an opponent; win the game and the pot is yours, lose and your stake money is forfeit. Should you get to a point where you don’t have enough capital to play a match, the game will send you to visit the loan shark once again.

You can play any of the characters at any stage, so long as you can cover the cost, but with a higher skilled foe comes a higher game ante and number of rounds in a match. Your opponents have limited capital, so eventually they’ll run out of money, forcing you to play a more difficult adversary.

Practice mode insists that you play against the A.I. Annoyingly opponents can take an age to make a shot; it’s clear that this is the A.I. deciding which move to make as it’s impossible to skip. The lack of Solo Play is exasperating. This would have given more time to master the art of shot making. The only reason you might choose to practice is to find out just how good the high level opponents are.

Once you arrive at the table, the game really starts to shine. Many pool games fall down purely due to the control method; select a power level and click shoot. Here it is a lot more satisfying. The cueing action is done via the analogue sticks; the quicker the action, the harder the shot. It’s a very similar method to swinging a club in the Tiger Woods series from EA. It makes a lot more sense as it gives the game a more realistic feel; you are actually making the shot, rather than machine doing it for you. This is further amplified by the satisfying clunks of balls colliding, sinking in the pockets and the physics which give an excellent simulation of how you’d expect the ball to travel. You can adjust spin and cue angle before you take a jab, allowing you to pull off trick shots and get the cue ball in position for your next play.

As you line up your cue, your opponent might challenge you to make a particularly tricky shot, displayed via a dollar icon. You can choose to take them on or not by clicking a button on the joypad. This way it doesn’t interfere with the flow of the game. Accurately aiming your shot can often be a problem in such games. Without the binocular vision of real life you’re never going to get this 100%, here the differing camera angles available make the process painless; fine sliced shots can be judged, it might even improve your aim in the real thing.

The attention to detail is well thought out. Particularly aggressive cueing will leave chalk marks on the table cloth. Pocket a ball and you see them sliding down the table mechanism, just as they do at the pub. You only ever see your opponent’s hand (all unique for each player) rather than the whole, but this really doesn’t detract from the game.

There are many different varieties of pool on offer; UK 8-ball, 9-ball, rotation, 15-ball and more. Most people will be familiar with UK rules, but perhaps not so with 9-ball. As one might imagine, the rack contains nine balls. Any ball can be sunk in a pocket at any time. However, with each shot the player must hit the lowest number ball on the table first. Sink the 9-ball and the game is won. 10-ball, 15-ball all follow a similar scheme only with more balls to play with.

Perhaps the most interesting variations on the theme are 'Killer' and 'Bowlliards'. In Killer you may pocket any ball, but you must make a pot. Miss and you lose a life, lose all lives and the game is forfeit. Bowlliards is ten pin pool. Here you are given two visits to the table each round, and you shoot till you miss. The number of balls you pot is then scored as it would be in ten pin bowling.

The game doesn’t allow you to directly select the type of pool game you want to play. Your opponent decides the variety, so if you want to specifically play 9-ball you’ll have to select someone offering to play that game. This selection method is a bit irksome as some types of game take a lot longer to play than others, influencing to a large degree who you play.

With your accrued pocket money, rafts of unlockables are yours for the taking and there are plenty of them. Different patterned cues, a game of darts, the defender arcade game, odd shaped tables such as Ts, Ls, hexagons and triangles to name a few. They aren’t cheap to purchase, so you will be playing a lot of pool and placing a lot of bets to acquire them all. The good news is that this is a lot of fun; it’s a particularly addictive experience.

It is a good pool simulation, for extra realism you could add stale beer stains and fag burns to your carpet. It will take you a long time to unlock everything, but it’s not without its flaws. The length of time it takes the AI to make a shot grates, and the lack of solo practice annoys. It’s this miss-cue that sadly stops the game from reaching the championship finals. A worthy purchase nonetheless.