Hustle Kings VR review: The inevitable virtual reality pool game

VooFoo Studios' capable pool sim gets a PSVR-enabled re-release, but adds very little.

NOTE: This article is a contribution and do not necessarily represent the views of IBTimes.

Hustle Kings VR is a port of Hustle Kings: a pool game with a dumb name first released on PS3 in 2009, and spruced up for PS4 in 2015. It's back, this time with VR support that adds exactly what you'd expect from the first person virtual reality perspective, and very little else.

The virtual reality part of Hustle Kings VR allows players to look at the shot they're lining up from any side of the table and lean in, if they insist.

Guidelines show what your shots will accomplish (with no apparent way of turning this off) making them all too easy, but the virtual reality does have a certain amount of purpose. At the very least it offers more more viewpoints than previous games. However, that's all VR adds to the experience.

Hustle Kings VR does add a new control method, utilising the PlayStation Move controllers PSVR has brought back into relevance. Fiddly, frustrating and really quite counter-intuitive, it's comfortably the worst of the three available methods in the game.

Everything else is pretty much the same. Even the bar locations show the same dated ads for LittleBigPlanet 3 and Resogun. The HUD is also identical. Identical, but stretched out across the player's point of view, so when you're powering up a shot or applying spin you need to look to the left or their right to see the appropriate indicator.

Everything is the same, except for how players see the game they're playing and a control method for sadists only.

The sport Hustle Kings is here to depict is recreated ably, and there's certainly enough here for die hard fans of the sport to delve into, but the exact same can be said of the original PS4 version.

Hustle Kings VR (4/10)

It's the same game as Hustle Kings PS4, only with the addition of rudimentary virtual reality support and irritating Move control support. Unless you're a particularly obsessed with video game pool, Hustle Kings VR offers little more than the ability to look at balls closer than you ever have before.