Processing the information quickens with repeat exposure, and the pressure-free practice mode helps, but not enough. 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. 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. The presentation is glossy and likable, although the concept's probably overkill for a sit-down console. 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. 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. There's too much information to process at a glance - suits, card values, possible hands, and the consequences of moving individual cards around. This sounds good in theory, but it doesn't play well. If the cards reach the top of the play area in the two pressure modes, it's game over. 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. 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. The game's distinctive characteristic, as the title suggests, is that you clear cards by creating poker hands.Įxcept it's a bit simpler than that. If there's a space for a card to fall into, it will - unless you sweep it across the gap at pace. As they do, you can move any card horizontally without restriction with the right analogue stick, while the left is for simple selection. Poker Smash is a puzzle game where playing cards ascend a rectangular playing area like the one in Tetris.
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