About this game
The felt on the table has that specific kind of cheap digital sheen, you know the one, where you can almost feel the friction through the screen. That's what hits me first with JackPool. It's not trying to be a high end sim, it's got this unpolished, almost homemade texture to the whole thing. The balls don't click with a satisfying resin crack, it's more of a soft thud, and the cue action is just a power bar you yank back. It's clumsy, but in a way that makes you hyper aware of the mouse in your hand.
The whole gimmick is this weird mashup of billiards and blackjack. Sink balls to hit 21. Don't bust. The dealer is this blonde, a real model I guess, who starts off in a tight dress and this look that says she's already bored of your shit. You win a hand, she loses a piece of clothing. It's a striptease game, pure and simple. There's a brunette too, for the lesbian scenes later, which is a nice touch if you're into that. The video clips are grainy, like they were shot on a camcorder from 2005, and the loop is a bit janky. She'll take off her top and then the animation just... resets for a second. It's jarring. But then she leans forward to line up her own shot, and the low angle is just, well, it works. The texture of her skin under that bad lighting feels more real than some 4K renders I've seen.
I wish the pool physics weren't so floaty. A ball will just drift into a pocket like it's on an air hockey table. But then I'll scratch on the 8-ball and she'll smirk, and I'm right back to trying to calculate angles. The blackjack part is completely brainless, it's all about the potting. It's a strip pool game that knows exactly what it is, a bit of tactile fantasy with some video clips stitched on. The whole thing feels like finding a dusty VHS tape you shouldn't be watching, and that's not an insult.