Ah, snooker. Rose-tinted memories of days spent at my local club, desperately attempting to make a break higher than 24 and smiling as the old lady behind the bar mistakenly gave me £10 change from a £5 note. Such settings seem an entire world away from current goings on at Wembley, where the Snooker Masters is being played out in a plush auditorium with a quiet, deeply interested crowd watching on. Closest I ever got to that was when a group of people started wandering past asking if they could borrow our chalk every few minutes.

I digress. World Championship Snooker 2007 sets out as this season’s official title, offering a selection of not only the finest cue sport the world has to offer, but also its smaller, easier half-brother pool too. Packed in are over 30 snooker and pool stars to test yourself against, a range of different locations and a number of challenges and modes in which to dip your wick, such as multiplayer matches, trick shot mode and free play modes for both pool and snooker to allow some well-needed practice.

The primary mode to play your way through is the career option on offer. The game prompts you to create your own snookering likeness, although in comparison with other sports titles’ create-a-player modes this one feels fairly basic, meaning that it’s a bit hit-and-miss whether or not you’ll actually be able to make something even resembling yourself or not.

Having created yourself, you’re then given the option whether you would like to take part in a snooker season, a pool season or a hybrid. In practicality it’s more advantageous to plump for either the former two, as getting used to the game and the ins and outs is served far better by sticking to and mastering one discipline rather than trying to get used to both at the same time.

From there, you carry on through a calendar year with the aim of improving your world ranking and winning as many trophies as you can. Your initial character will have very basic skills that you can improve by adding attribute points gained from winning championship matches. Doing so will initially prove somewhat of a tricky process, as once out on the green baize you soon come to realise that the game is as unforgiving as you’d imagine playing against the world’s best would be.

Now, aiming and judging angles on a real snooker table is tricky enough, but doing the same on a television screen when detached from the action is another matter completely. To aid this, Snooker 2007 offers an aiming guide to help the player line up pots, tracking the path of cue and object balls. Whilst you might assume that this completely takes away the challenge, the lines don’t take into account any collisions of nudges either ball will get on the way, so judging line and weight of shots is still crucial.

To help a little more, the developers have chucked in a shadow that hovers on the table around about where your cue ball is estimated to finish after each shot. The more power or more extreme an angle you require for each shot, the bigger the circle is and the more you rely on a slice of luck to end up in a good position. As with the shot line indicators, both can be turned completely off if you fancy a bit of ultra difficult potting action.

Most people will stick with the aids for a while though, and even with them turned on you’ll tend to get a bit whupped for the first few matches. Make a mistake and leave an opponent on and he’ll usually make you pay, clearing up any available reds and colours with glee. It puts even more importance on your own time at the table, and you’ll often find yourself taking whole minutes over shot selection and placement. Some of my attempts at building a good break were so slow and painstaking that they made Peter Ebdon look like Harry Hill.

Not that Peter Ebdon actually looks much like Peter Ebdon either, mind. Whilst not necessarily being a sport that requires a huge graphical tour-de-force, Snooker 2007 looks suspiciously like being a slightly polished adaptation of the PlayStation 2 version. Players all strut around as if they are actually penguins turning up to a fancy dress party dressed as snooker players, whereas the cueing action displayed by each player looks as if it’s the result of a horrific arm fracture. Rockstar showed that a simple sport such as table tennis could benefit brilliantly from a good dose of visual care and attention, so hopefully developers Blade will take note and bump things up for next year.

That said though, graphical issues don’t deplete from the intense nature that the game provides, and that is its main trump card. Snooker as a sport is full of nerve-wracking moments of intense concentration and pressure, and Snooker 2007 conveys that very well indeed. Be it the burst of relief when the black sinks into the pocket to seal a last-gasp frame victory or the crushing moment a red rattles in the jaws to prevent you continuing a good break, the game will have you squinting harder and tightening your grip on the controller as you go.

That is, of course, if you enjoy snooker or pool. World Championship Snooker 2007 is undoubtedly a niche title aimed at fans and fans only, so if you’re not into the sport then it’s highly unlikely you’ll want to play through the game (or read a review about it for that matter). However, for those yearning for the chance to step up to the table and teach Ronnie O’Sullivan a trick or two, this is about as close as you’ll ever get.