World Snooker Championship 2007

It could be argued that World Snooker Championship 2007 was the game that started my achievement obsession. I borrowed it from a friend thinking to myself, ‘how hard can a snooker game be? I will surely have an advantage over the competition, right?’ (this is based on the fact I know the rules of snooker). I was terribly wrong but more about that under the achievement section.

As this is a sports simulation there isn’t much a story but here’s the backdrop. You are a new pro with an undefined age and face but you are definitely a man. You have decided to become a snooker player due to unfulfilled childhood dreams and your ability with a cue (natural talent, of course) and so you are thrown into the fray outside of the world’s top 48 players.

You must overcome various obstacles to become the world’s greatest snooker player. And once you've done that, you can do it all again as a pool player.

It’s kind of hard to get wrong with such limited things in the game, but it does pull off the real life player resemblances really well. You can identify all of the popular players from their faces with real ease, as long as you know about snooker, of course.

However it loses points for the environment. The table looks good but the audience is rubbish. You can be playing in the world championship final in front of less people than it takes to fill an average size shoebox. Not only that but their ‘applause’ doesn’t match up with the sound and they make the noise of a few thousand people. They also continually stand up over and over as if they are doing a Mexican wave in celebration of your victory.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

As at the time of writing, only 73 people have completed the game and there are several reasons why. Concentrating on the career modes, you have to complete three of these to win all of the titles available. Ranking points are at a premium and you essentially have to win all the matches you play in order to progress through the rankings at a slow pace. God knows how long this would take if you played legitimately. The snooker and pool are both unforgiving in terms of your opponents. You can skip their shots but I never did just to see some of the unrealistic bullshit they pull off in the pool. The snooker is fine as most good players can pull off frame winning breaks... but no one in real life can continually perform back to back century breaks like the player you face here. It’s utterly ridiculous and even some of the worse players will destroy you for playing an average safety shot.

Anyway, in order to actually get through all careers as quickly as possible, you need to quit to the dashboard every time you are about to lose a frame. Which is a lot. Or at least it was for me. Essentially 90% of the achievements boil down to Winning all the Championships. This requires you to get into the top 16 in both pool and snooker careers and also complete the hybrid career until you get into the top 16 there too. This last one is stupid as it basically requires you to repeat what you’ve already done again.

Outside of this, there appears to be another one that people struggle with and that’s for winning a frame of snooker when you require snookers. I can’t remember how I did this but I vaguely remember the AI missing a really easy yellow that a pool player would have potted after hitting the white off three cushions. I can understand this being frustratingly difficult though as it’s down to luck as to whether you get a snooker and then have the super powered AI miss their target ball... after they have already left you needing snookers which means they have to miss at least twice for this to happen.

Even with using quit outs, which will become less frequent the better your player gets, the game will still take in excess of 100 hours to complete.

Downloadable Content – N/A

World Snooker Championship 2007 was not fun to complete but it did feel really rewarding when that last achievement unlocked. If you want to play a snooker game I would simply recommend not doing so. Or maybe World Snooker Championship 2009.