Review: Texas Hold 'Em (Xbox Live Arcade) (360)

It's taken long enough, but finally poker has arrived on Xbox Live Arcade. The delay was due to a sponsorship deal that was going to make the game free, which sadly fell through, making this an 800 point game (about eight quid in real money); but Microsoft politely let it go free for a couple of days, resulting in a hundred downloads per minute on the first day. As you'd expect, Gamestyle was there and has been playing it since.

It has one big flaw: the entire single-player experience. It doesn't go to any real effort to teach new players how to play, and if you know the game, there are few modes to tempt you. The complete lack of poker variants might have been acceptable if the AI was good, but sadly that isn't the case. AI players rarely call raises and can be scared away from even the biggest pot, making winning simple and extremely dull. The only extra mode is a Scenarios mode, which flings you onto a table with an objective of winning when starting with the lowest stack or similar, but the AI ruins this too.

Online play is clearly the main attraction and thankfully it is better. The persistent bankroll (if you lose all your chips you'll have to enter free tournaments to win money back to get going again) is a good idea, and while it doesn't deter smack-talking American children from throwing in all their chips the second they get a pair, it does make the pretend chips feel a little more valuable. Tournaments are more fun to play as the all-in lovers drop out quite quickly, but as with all Xbox Live games, it's so much better with friends it is very almost untrue. The only slight problem is that it is quite slow compared with playing online at poker sites, due in part to the fact you can't act before your turn.

In fact there are plenty of niggles like that. The worst has to be that anyone with a standard definition television will have to learn to start recognising cards or squinting lots as they are incredibly difficult to read, although it is fine for high-definition folk. The controls can be annoying too; it's much too easy to accidentally go all-in as it only requires two taps of the same button. And if you don't love repetitive slide guitar sound effects and music then you'll be thanking Microsoft for including custom soundtracks very quickly - the in-game music is really, really annoying.

When it comes down to it, this isn't really a very good game. It feels cheap and tacky, missing things you'd hope for and things you'd expect, and the single player mode is terrible. Still, try as they might, they've not managed to stop poker being great fun, especially with friends. Annoyingly that makes this worth those 800 points. Assuming you can get to play it online a fair bit, there's little better right now.

Rating: 7 / 10

Words by Andrew Revell