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Where on earth are all these blocks coming from? Sometimes they fall and other times they rise, but they always have to be disposed of quickly and efficiently. Poker Smash is another game in which hundreds of tiles rising from the bottom need to be arranged in a way that gets rid of them as fast as possible, but it borrows from the best of the genre while bringing its own ideas to the table in a way that makes it both fresh and addictive.
The ubiquitous tiles in Poker Smash are, as the title implies, cards. 10, Jack, Queen, King, and Ace come in the four suits, and arranging them in poker hands clears them off the board. One and two pair are passed over, because that would just be too easy, but three of a kind, full house, straight, flush, and straight flush leave you plenty to work with. The trick isn't so much keeping the board free of tiles as it is maximizing the score by building combos. Building endless low-point three of a kinds is easy and boring, but chasing the big scores by building the trickier hands becomes addicting fast.
Organizing the tiles as they rise up the screen is simple, and will be instantly familiar to anyone who's played Tetris Attack. The board is five tiles wide and a cursor moves around it with either the left stick or thumb bad, and the right stick moves the highlited tile horizontally. When a tile is moved the cursor moves with it, so keeping the right stick held moves the tile quickly across the board. Tiles can even be moved across gaps, although if you stop moving on a spot with nothing below the tile will fall to fill up the space. In practical terms this means that organizing the board is very efficient, leaving your brain free to try to see the potential patterns in a screen filled with blocks.
As the game progresses and the tiles rise faster, a few things will help slow the pace and keep the situation in hand. When a pattern is created, the board stops rising for a bit. A simple three of a kind only gets a brief second's respite, but more complex hands get larger amounts of time. On top of that there's a stock of bombs that can blow up one tile apiece, and the board will stop rising until it explodes. There's a maximum stock of five bombs available at once, and the point cost to replace them is low. It takes a bit to get used to using them, due to years of conditioning from other puzzle games where items are either limited or nonexistent, but the bombs are key to both managing time and creating huge combos. If bombs and combos still aren't enough, the right trigger slows time to a crawl for a limited period and the left speeds it up. Poker Smash has a good amount of tools to work with that, when used effectively, make it one of the deeper puzzle games around.
If the main Action mode isn't quite enough, Poker Smash comes with several other ways to play. Timed challenges you to score as much as possible in three minutes, while Puzzle has a series of pre-set boards that need to be cleared in as few moves as possible. Rounding out the package is multiplayer, which is best played locally seeing as online doesn't actually show the opposing player's board. It's not strictly necessary to know what the other players are doing, seeing as the pile of chips you're fighting over is always visible, but it's still a strange omission. Still, as nice as the extra modes and multiplayer are, the core is always going to be the main Action mode.
Poker Smash is at its best when it's you versus the endlessly rising tide of pieces, while the depth of options available to line up and clear out the large hands and combos means there's always ways to improve both score and performance. It's a fun and engaging tile-based puzzle game that's clean and maybe a bit bland until the large hands start popping all over the board, at which point it becomes a game of controlling the chaos and keeping the combo alive. Poker Smash is a rock solid bit of gaming, and an easy recommend for anyone who's ever found clearing out thousands of tiles a fun way to spend an evening's gaming. |
