Thank god I got this game for free, otherwise I would’ve never bought it. You know, us Dutch people can’t resist anything free and while I was in Leipzig attending the Games Convention 2006 I had to call home to let someone else download it for me. Probably a $10 phone call, but it’s the thought that counts.

I’d like to start off by saying I haven’t played Poker in my life, ever. Not even strip poker, and can you imagine me reviewing this game without knowing jack shit about it? Well, the rules ain’t so tough, at least that’s what they want you to believe. When entering the help mode, the game gets explained in about 10 screens, which seems fair enough doesn’t it? While reading through all the rules I said to myself, ‘you should write down all these card combination cause you’ll forget em’, so I didn’t.

To not make a complete fool out of myself I obviously opened up the singleplayer menu where you’re presented with three options. Standard game, Tournament and Scenario. Standard game is just unlimited play where you can set the Buy-in’ amount and some other stuff. When playing with the lowest amount you can win money, and you can’t lose any! Vegas here I come! Tournament is just like it sounds, just play until everybody’s eliminated. Scenario mode is a little different. You can choose from 7 different scenarios each offering a different set-up but your goal is to eliminate the other players or ending up with the biggest wad of cash.

Playing this game versus other players is what really makes Poker fun. But Microsoft did a bad job by not implementing Xbox Live Vision. In Uno it’s just a fun gimmick, but this is Poker, where you’ll have to put up your Christopher Reeve face to make other people believe you have cards that you actually don’t have. But making remarks to other people is fun as well: “you smell!”.

Graphics wise the game isn’t really that special, but hey, it’s a frikkin’ card game. I was actually surprised they built a 3D-engine for it, which is only used when zooming around a bit on the table. The sounds are a different story. While the sound effects are quite all right, the music is hellish. The same loop playing over and over again, without exaggerating it’s a 15 second loop or something, so the lonely guitarist in the corner was quickly put out of business.

I like the game, for a first time poker experience it’s quite fun, although I can imagine people who’ve played a million different varieties of the game find it a little underwhelming. The only thing I dislike is the price, 800 points for a game that was free for 48 hours is just wrong. What if you’re separated from your Xbox 360 by force or something like that? If you really like Uno, you’ll like this as well probably.

Final Score: 7 out of 10 - Above Average (how do we rank games?)