From the maker of one of my favorite games for the Pre, Gobico Games, comes another fantastic one that’s just as fun and addicting as the other. Poker Drops follows suit with Wobble Words in providing an addictive game play with challenging levels and a polished feel that I’ll be sure to recommend to other Palm phone owners again and again.
But what makes this game so awesome? It’s not just the unique gameplay that makes this app fun (as shared below), but also the intense attention to the audio and visual details that makes me want to play as often as I can.
Wanna know the details? Let’s break it down.
The Gameplay
If you’re familiar with the first game made by Gobico, Wobble Words (see my review here), then you already understand the basic gameplay idea. Rather than finding words to get points, though, you look for Poker hands and card combinations to make it to the leaderboard and get some cleverly-titled trophies.
When you launch the app and start a new game you’ll see a 4×4 board with various cards and suits spread across. Select your cards by touching and dragging (adjacent cards only) and match up the right combos for higher scores and bonuses. You can select anything from 2 cards that make a pair (x2 bonus) to the ultimate combo of a Royal Flush (x50 bonus).
Scores are figured by finding the sum of all cards in the hand and then multiplying in the bonuses. I found that always using 5 cards (even if only using 2 to make a pair) is an easy way to increase the score a bit and clear some of the lower cards off the board that you don’t want to use.
Jokers are, of course, the wild cards and come in really handy when trying to get a high score. Personally, though, I feel that they appear too often and make it too easy to get higher scores. But that’s just a personal preference, I think, and not really a problem with the gameplay.
There are only two problems that I’ve found with the gameplay. Touch-and-drag can sometimes grab the wrong cards or not grab the last one that I wanted to use in a hand (and reducing my score for that hand). It would be nice (as I mentioned in the Wobble Words review) to be able to change that setting so that I just tap each card (without the drag). At least that would reduce touch-error.
The other thing that I would have liked to have seen was a setting so that you could only use 5 cards to get a score (no less, no more). That would force me to actually look for a full hand rather than any combination of pairs or triplets. Maybe a Hard mode could be built to add this?
Game Features
There are a few extra game features that stand out to me and make this game really special. I can switch between a 4×4 and 5×5 game board, turn off the jokers and switch to an Easy mode (allows for more than 5 cards in a combination).
They’ve built in some great multi-player extras as well. Finish a round and put your name into the text box to submit your score, then pass it to your friend. When they finish a round, they’ll have the same opportunity to type in their own name and save their score.
On top of that, when you do select ‘Pass to the next player’, they’ll be given the exact same card combinations. So now when you win it’s not just because you got better cards than your friends… You’re just better. ;)
The Polish (Audio and Visual)
Gobico Games has done an excellent job (again) with the game’s audio and visual aspects. I love the music and sound effects that play in the background (gets me pumped and ‘in the zone’ for better playing). The design of the game is stellar and makes me wish that every app was designed like this. The 5 themes that come with the game are pretty excellent, too (though I like the default green theme the best).
Transitions are pretty nice too. Each time you find a card combination and the selected ones disappear, the next cards are added as if they’ve been dealt to the board. If you ask me, that’s pretty cool.
- Great, fun, addictive and unique gameplay
- Fun and competitive multi-player features
- Useful for brushing up on your Poker hands!
- Beautiful graphics and engaging Audio
Honestly, these aren’t cons as much as they are feature requests for an update.
- Touch-and-grab sometimes messes up the hands
- Would like a hard mode that requires 5 cards in a hand
Bottom Line
For 2 bucks ($1.99) you can get a great poker-themed game that will keep you occupied for hours. Even if Poker isn’t really your thing (it’s not mine), this is still a lot of fun and worth the price. To put it simply: Gobico Games has done it again with this cool game and you should check it out.
Interested? Why not learn more and download it straight to your phone from appRoundup?
Gallery
- Sent from my Palm Pre
The Palm Pre Challenge is a series of articles written by Tim Stiffler-Dean. For 30 days he uses a Palm Pre exclusively for all of his computing needs. You can read all of the Palm Pre Challenge articles here.
Follow Tim Stiffler-Dean and his Palm Pre Challenge here on webOSroundup.com or on Twitter: @anotherguy and #PalmPreChallenge. You can also see his personal blog AnotherGuy.us
Good review – I've had a lot of fun with Poker Drops :-)
Hey thanks for taking the time to review Poker Drops! I really appreciate it. A new update just came out which fixes a weird bug with jokers. The tap-to-select approach you mention is something that should come out as an option in a later release. Thanks again!
Really looking forward to seeing those updates. Thanks for listening, David. :)
Really looking forward to seeing those updates. Thanks for listening, David. :)