XBLIG News, Reviews & Previews

Carrum has now been released onto the Xbox Marketplace and is available for purchase at a cost of 400

"Currum? WTF is that?" you well may say. Well, the developer DrMistry describes it as "The Grandfather of Pool". Brilliant description if you ask me.

The first thing that sprang to mind when I first played Carrum (apart from pool of course) was air hockey - as the game uses disks, which consist of eighteen carrom-men in black and white, these are the equivalent of the red and yellow balls of a pool table. Then there's the Queen(black ball equivalent in pool), which in the case of Carrum is a red disk.

Now these carrom-men and the Queen are setup in the centre of a square table which consists of four pockets, one in each corner. Each player, up to a total of four has their predefined baseline from where they take each shot i.e. you get to place your Striker (white ball) anywhere along a predefined line prior to taking each shot. The shot must be then played away from the player i.e. you cannot play backwards. I think that pretty much covers most of it.

In the normal version of the game, the aim is then to pot all of your carrom-men then once those are down, pot the queen. Simple!

Carrum is created using 3D graphics and allows you to pan around to any camera angle to help better take your shot. The graphics used are in my opinion very well done and the game is very well presented. The physics used as far as I can tell are faultless i.e. I still suck at pool

Carrum not only comes with local multiplayer, but can also be played over Live, which as far as I'm concerned is absolutely brilliant - I've played many a pool style game in my time, but never one that can be played across a network.

I would highly recommend this game to anyone who is a fan of pool, definitely worth a purchase and probably on my list of Community Games to buy!