Poker Smash Review

Do you remember Tetris Attack? You should, or I'm going to have to kill you. Tetris Attack's simple yet fiendishly addictive block-swapping trash-dropping gameplay is a fond memory for many SNES owners. While Nintendo has half-heartedly released a couple of pseudo-sequels under the banner "Puzzle League", no real attempt to change the underlying core gameplay has been made. Enter Void Star Creations' Poker Smash, released for 800 Microsoft Points for the Xbox Live Arcade.

Void Star are clearly fans of the basic gameplay who, in engineering spirit, appear to have set out attempting to upgrade the game and breathe some life into it. To their credit, these improvements have definitely created a unique take on the formula. However, while some of the features are interesting, it looks like a bit too much relaxing of the rules took place.

Rather than continue in a narrative format, I think it fits the review better (and keeps me from getting too verbose) by switching to a list of what changed, whether it was good or bad:

She Moooooooves Me! In all other Tetris Attack-style games, movement is done one square sideways at a time. If moving a tile one square to the left put a block over air, it would fall. In Poker Smash, owing to its "left stick moves the cursor (which is one block rather than 2), right stick moves the pieces left and right" scheme, you can hold a movement as long as you want, moving a piece clear from one side of the field to the other even if there's nothing for it to stand on along the way. This adds combo opportunities that previously weren't available in other iterations of the game, and the scheme, while not quite as responsive as the classic one (which was totally doable on the xbox controller), does an admirable job of keeping the game fast paced. It's one of many changes that make high scoring easier, though.

Let's play the Match Game! Other Tetris Attack games merely let you match colors/shapes. One variety of match. Poker Smash, by having the pieces contain both a rank (thankfully, associated with a color, aiding long-time players) and a suit, any standard poker hand is formable. This increase in match possibilities can range from interesting to infuriating, depending on your play style. Full houses, especially, are quite annoying, because they mess up one of the easier ways to set up chains: A vertical group of 3 with another group of 2 on top used to be a 2 chain, and is now a full house. This is a HARD habit to break, but new players get to dodge that bullet.

Prince of Persia? Again? One of Poker Smash's more touted features is the addition of a self-refilling SLOW MOTION ability. This, more than anything, is the feature that makes the game massively easier to chain. The length of time your slow motion lasts allows for quite a lot of adjustments, and if you're skilled enough, you can recharge it enough DURING a chain to give you even more breathing room. While the disappearing and dropping of pieces slows down, your movements go at full speed, allowing quick skill drops that drastically increase the length of your chain.

Some features really bombed, however. Like the "bomb" feature, allowing you to store up to 5 bombs that destroy one piece each. While they conveniently wait for each other to explode (allowing you to destroy an entire row at once if you want to, rather than it sort of cascading down), the bombs' inability to count towards a chain (in fact, I think they even break a chain even when you place it somewhere completely separate from it) make them unusable in most situations. The only place they're usable is...

Challenge? I don't need no steenking CHALLENGE! The Challenges that the game throws at you while you're playing are at the same time a good idea but an annoyance in practice. The scoring in the single-player game is so totally skewed towards either massive chains (which, even with slow motion, still take some skill to pull off) or the challenges that making regular matches is just a way to kill time more than actually boost your score. The problem is that the game assigns a random time frame to the challenges, sometimes giving you as little as 5 seconds to, say, find 5 Queens to make a match with. The bombs help you here by letting you more precisely drop pieces to create these matches, but overall their inopportune timing and small time frame for completion prove quite frustrating.

The multiplayer deserves very little mention, because, in all honesty, it's not very good. While the single-player area of the game works very hard to make everything obvious and easy to understand, from allowing you to "buy" hints to the puzzle mode (You get x moves to destroy y piece formation, and let me tell you, the fact you can make those poker hands makes those puzzles EVIL pretty quick) to letting you watch other people's replays (89 chain? The hell?), the multiplayer manages to be completely impossible to understand and predict.

In theory, it appears to work on the principle of "Each player starts with 5000 chips, and they steal them from each other by scoring matches". However, the game does a poor job of giving you feedback as to what, exactly, you're stealing, and the garbage that you throw on your enemies is piss-weak compared to the screen-filling mounds of crap you could throw in Tetris Attack, and you're given next to no clue as to what is the best method of attack. It doesn't lag at all, which is refreshing for an Arcade game, but it really could've used some better clarification.

Graphically, the game is passable. It's unfair to expect a $10 game to look flat out amazing, but the game runs with little to no slowdown, has a decent if derivative 2.5-D look to it, and particle effects are always shiny. The soundtrack to the game, in my opinion, is actually one of the high points. The singleplayer game cycles through multiple different field appearances, each with their own music track, and with the exception of the horrible hair metal-esque guitar track, they're all surprisingly listenable. I guess you could say their downside is that they don't stand up to too many repeat viewings all that well, but they're not as horrendous as they could've been.

Overall, Poker Smash is worth $10 to certain people. Puzzle game enthusiasts, Tetris Attack fiends (me!) who are willing to look past some of the games' changes to the formula, and any person who's one of those wackos that can sit at a game and force their score to be massive in a week will all enjoy Poker Smash. The game overall could've used a little more tweaking to make the foundation more solid, and the achievements are moderately difficult with the exception of a couple. One achievement involving buying all of the play fields in the game store is a nasty grind, owing to the last few costing quite a lot of points that all but the most skilled of chainers will take a while to get. All in all, though, the overall experience is well done. For a developer I'd not heard of before, Void Star has definitely left my interest piqued as to what they're doing next, because it definitely felt like a labor of love rather than a labor of trying to cash in.

tl;dr version:

If you like Tetris Attack, odds are you'll like this game as long as you keep an open mind.
Some changes were neat, some changes were annoying, but all of the changes could've used a bit more tweaking to balance them better.
Graphics are okay and steady, music is pretty good but there isn't enough of it.
Multiplayer is lag-free but also incoherent.
Achievement difficulty is moderate, with one grinding achievement really sticking out from the other skill-based ones.

Jam it back in, in the dark.