Poker Smash Review , Xbox 360

[Eric]

Poker Smash is a puzzle game where playing cards ascend a rectangular
playing area like the one in Tetris. As they do, you can move any card
horizontally without restriction with the right analogue stick, while
the left is for simple selection. If there's a space for a card to
fall into, it will - unless you sweep it across the gap at pace. The
game's distinctive characteristic, as the title suggests, is that you
clear cards by creating poker hands.

Except it's a bit simpler than that. Cards in play are tens, jacks,
queens, kings and aces of all four suits, and the hands that work are
three, four and five of a kind, flush, full house, straight and a
royal flush. Create one of these hands horizontally or vertically and
the cards involved disappear, leaving the ones above them to observe
the puzzle game tradition of sliding into the exposed gap or gaps. If
the cards reach the top of the play area in the two pressure modes,
it's game over.

This sounds good in theory, but it doesn't play well. There's too much
information to process at a glance - suits, card values, possible
hands, and the consequences of moving individual cards around. Doing
this at pace would be even more awkward were it not for the
developer's trick of giving each of the five card values a particular
colour, which scans better. Elsewhere, suit markers wink at you when a
flush is sort of possible, and a stock of bombs allows you to burst
out of dead ends if you can't steer things your way.

The result of all this is that you look for colour first, and then
revolve through other possibilities when nothing's making itself
obvious, reaching for the crutches when the columns start to shudder
in anticipation of crossing the game-over line. Allowed to play it by
colour, Poker Smash becomes a fairly standard three-in-a-row game
where you occasionally catch something else out of the corner of your
eye, or fluke an excellent hand. Processing the information quickens
with repeat exposure, and the pressure-free practice mode helps, but
not enough. It's at once too hard and too easy - perhaps explaining
why it has both a 'speed up' button and a recharging slow-mo bar to
utilise as conditions start to get the better of your reaction times.

Another reason to have speed-up is so you can introduce half-visible
cards on the verge of entering the play area to whatever you're doing.
The speed of the cards' ascent increases frequently in the standard
endless mode, which also occasionally introduces an impromptu time-
limited challenge (say, get five kings in a row), which nets you bonus
points if you can meet it.

There's also a timed mode, a bit like Zoo Keeper DS's time attack,
where you're given three minutes to amass the best score. Online
leaderboards could make this bit work, but empirical evidence (i.e.
what happens to me) indicates that you will never be the best in the
world at this sort of thing, so make sure your friends are taking the
plunge as well if this is something you find appealing.

The other mode is called Puzzle. Each task presents you with a little
haystack of cards of different suits and values, and asks you to
untangle them and leave none behind, at which point you progress to
the next puzzle along. Yes, it's like the bits for capturing mounts in
Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, for those with a working
knowledge of that game (and if you haven't, you have no business
considering buying this - go deal with that first, and we'll see you
next month).

Those Puzzle Quest bits were hardly amazing, though. In fact, we got
so fed up with them that we fell back on the illustrated solutions on
GameFAQS (a hero, whoever that was). You have to think too many moves
ahead, and in several dimensions because you're considering suits,
numbers, hands and manoeuvring implications along all those axes.

So Poker Smash doesn't really work. Borrowing familiar poker hands is
a nice idea on paper, but the need to include colours, winking icons
and bombs ought to have been clue enough to leave it there alongside
the spider-web doodles. There's certainly nothing objectionable about
the game per se , and it wallpapers the hours happily, with
multiplayer bits that prove fairly moreish, but if you've got the cash
equivalent 800 Microsoft Points about your digital person, you can
either buy a better puzzle game elsewhere or - if it was the poker bit
that enticed you - throw a few quid into the kitty of one of the
ubiquitous online poker sites, read Wikipedia for the basic rules, and
set yourself up for an evening on tables with one- or two-penny
blinds.
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