Microsoft have been milking the avatars for all they're worth for a while now, what with the avatar clothes store housing more accessories, clothes and pets than there are arcade games on the Xbox Live Arcade. All for dressing up a virtual doll - using your real money. Thankfully, if you've frittered away your life savings on a closet full of vampire costumes, Full House Poker gives you the chance to actually make use of them, making your avatar the centre of attention, and showcasing what the avatars do best - blank poker faces.
As the spiritual successor to the much-loved 1 vs. 100, the free-to-play gameshow that put you against a hundred real people (and the rest of the internet) in a meeting of the minds, the similarities with Full House Poker are few and far between. In fact, the only obvious comparisons are the regular play sessions, which mean you can take part in Xbox Live-wide games on certain nights of the week (even if you'll only have a few real players at your table), and, sadly, the online problems. Full House Poker seems a bit of a strange choice to succeed 1 vs. 100, as the latter was a free, easy to pick up and play quiz game, which offered real-life prizes - while Full House Poker costs 800 Microsoft Points (about £6.80), and is about as easy to get into as an airport with a backpack full of explosives if you've never played Poker before, with no prizes to be seen.
As the name suggests, Full House Poker is a poker game - but if, like me, you don't really know that much about Poker and have been talked into playing it by some poker-loving friends, you'll feel a little bit at sea. Even more so when you realise there's no actual tutorial to explain the rules to you - there is one minute-long video in the 'Help & Options' menu, entitled 'Texas Hold 'Em Rules', although that does little to explain the actual rules - telling you how the game progresses rather than what you actually need to do, complete with confusing terminology. Hopefully you have a competent friend willing to explain it to you...
Poker 101: These are chips. But not the edible kind.
After a few rounds, and much explaining, you do eventually begin to get the hang of it, and there are some handy features once you've got your head around the basic rules. Despite the distinct lack of details, you do have the ability to bring up a helpful list of the hierarchy of hands with a quick press of LB - something I find myself doing quite often, as I can't ever remember hands other than pairs and three of a kinds, let alone how good they are.
A large part of Full House Poker is it's XP system - you gain experience points (and level up) for doing different things in matches - 250XP for every time you deal in, as well as bonuses for winning hands, and 'Smart Folds', for knowing when things are going pear-shaped and it's time to quit while you're ahead. As you accumulate XP, you'll unlock furniture, themes and new card designs for your casino, as well as costumes and chip tricks (things like flipping a chip between your avatars' fingers) for use in games. And of course, if you're doing well, you'll be building your bankroll, which you'll need for buying in to the various tournaments.
Full House Poker is by far best when you're playing online against a bunch of friends - we found ourselves competing in quite a few of the 'Texas Heat' online tournaments, where 30 players spread over 3 tables compete with the rest of the world to finish with the most XP at the end of the half-hour 'show'. The tables are ranked, with the Diamond table being the lowest stake table, the Double Diamond being higher, and the Triple Diamond table being the ultimate in chip-haemorrhaging (or hoarding) goodness. After an arbitrary length of time at one table, the person with the most XP gets moved up to the next highest table, and the person with the least gets moved down a table - obviously if you're first on the Triple Diamond table, you're not going anywhere.
The stakes are rather high on the triple diamond table.
If you don't fancy taking part in the Texas Heat tournaments, there's the option to do either Ranked (a more competitive game, against people of a similar skill level to you) or Player (a more casual affair, against friends or people just looking for a fun game) matches, where you can join people in their casinos or invite them over to yours for a game or two of poker.
Full House Poker is obviously meant to be played online - which then makes me wonder why it's online is so riddled with problems... For starters, I was happily playing Bejeweled Blitz, when I received an invite to play Full House Poker off a friend - accepting the invite launched the game, as it always does, but before I could get into the game my whole console locked up and I had to turn it off an on again. At first, I thought this was just a coincidence - but it does it every single time, without fail. Don't worry - there is a workaround, as you can easily bypass it by making sure you launch the game first, before accepting any invites, but it's still a stupid, and obvious bug in a game that revolves around its online play.
Texas Heat tournaments too, while fun, are also prone to problems. Sometimes you'll find yourself randomly disconnected for no apparent reason, or the whole table will be stuck on one person's turn for a full five minutes (despite the strict time limit each persons' turn is supposed to have) - five minutes may not seem like a lot, but when each 'session' lasts thirty, that's a significant amount of time lost and could be the difference between winning or losing overall.
And while it's not a game-breaking problem, the way it awards XP online and offline seems to differ too - offline you'll get bonus XP for smart folds - folding when you know you've got a bad hand - but online, it often punishes you for folding early by giving you no XP for a few rounds, unless you happen to be on the Triple Diamond table, in which case you appear to be exempt. Confusing, yes?
The single player isn't really anything to write home about either - you get a choice between the Standard mode - which is just a bog standard game of poker than can carry on indefinitely - and Tournament mode, where the aim of the game is to be the last person left at the table with chips, having eliminated the remaining nine players. There's also the option for 'Pro Takedowns', which pit you against one of the AI characters in an attempt to reduce their chips to zero to win. The main problem with the single player is that the AI just isn't that good, as the characters often seem to choose from an almost binary list of either going all-in for a rubbish hand (chuffing Jayson), or folding pretty much as soon as they've been dealt their cards - meaning that a lot of the time, you're actually only against one or two AI characters, meaning the games take forever.
Whoever came up with Rai Singh needs to be shot.
Full House Poker isn't a bad poker game by any standards, but it's lack of tutorial and lack-lustre single player make it a game to play online with your friends only - meaning it's definitely only worth getting if you have an Xbox Live Gold Subsription (sold separately, for about £40 per annum).
Format Reviewed: Xbox 360
