The Game

You’re sitting at the poker table, you take a look at your cards and decide that you could definitely take the hand. You raise $100, take a breath, and look around. Your opponents are analyzing your every facial expression and your every gesture for any sign that you are bluffing. You pretend to nervously look away and your opponent immediately jumps on the chance to call your raise. Perfect, you’ve got them right where you want them, so you decide to take a sip of your soda and check the time. You’ve been playing Hover Poker this entire time! Your opponent? Your buddy, sitting right next to you.

You really are surrounded by your opponents, but they are more than likely your friends, as Hover Poker lets you essentially play multi-player poker with the same device, passing it around for different turns. All cards are hidden, and when it is your turn you simply touch and hold on the two peek buttons to take a look at your hand. There is a peek counter, which is a great touch, so should the counter not be zero when it is your turn and the device is passed to you, go ahead and punch whomever just passed it to you in the arm – they looked at your cards! All the usual rules of poker apply, small and big blinds pay their antes automatically, best hand wins, and you can fold, call, or raise.

The user interface could definitely use some improvement. When you wish to check, you are forced to hit the “Call” button, which logically makes sense but should definitely change to a “Check” button as to not confuse others. In addition, when raising your bet, you are given the choice between the more and less button which works in increments of $10, or the slider which lets you increase your bet much quicker but inaccurately. Lastly, going all-in is quite annoying when you have a larger amount of chips on hand, would suggest an “All-In” button that would make it much easier!

Graphics

The graphics behind Hover Poker are nothing special, they are clear and they work, cannot really complain about it because I wouldn’t expect poker to have extraordinary graphics.

Sound

The verbal cues that the in-game announcer gives you are very helpful in letting you know what the actions of the previous players have been and whose turn it is. There is no other music present in Hover Poker, but that is to be expected.

Conclusion

Hover Poker delivers everything that a multiplayer, one device, portable poker game advertises: quick and simple games of poker that can be played up to six people. There really isn’t much more to it other than that, and a single player mode or an online multiplayer mode would be great additions.

The Game

Flipn’ Monsters! comes out of the box with two game modes: Classic and Arcade. Classic is your regular, run-of-the mill card matching game, where you are trying to match each card with its corresponding pair. You can also try to beat the clock and set a new high score.

The real meat of Flipn’ Monsters! comes in the form of the Arcade mode. Arcade mode is essentially an extremely fast-paced and frenetic twist on the Classic mode. You are shown all of the cards and their position for several seconds before the round starts, and it is up to you to make sure you remember where they are so you can match them again. You are trying to not make any errors matching up the cards so you can keep your streak going, which in turn gives you a points multiplier. This of course gets more difficult as cards will fall down if there is nothing beneath them, completely destroying any positional memorization you may have had.

Oh, it gets more fun than that too. You may have been wondering, where do the monsters come in on all of this? Well, the face of the cards can be one of nine types of original monsters. In Arcade mode, you start out with two types of monsters dominating the board, and every round you make it to will have an additional monster thrown in until you have all nine showing up on the board. The fact that they are all different colours might help you match them up, but it sure gets confusing quick.

Graphics

I definitely liked the fact that all the artwork of Flipn’ Monsters! is completely original and the monsters themselves are unique. The monsters made me want to say “aww” but also throw in an “eww” after, so I guess I would call them lovingly gross. This is one of the strong parts of Flipn’ Monsters!, because I feel that all of the art is just so professional looking that it adds a more polished feel to the game.

Sound

There aren’t much sound effects to be discussed with Flipn’ Monsters! but I will give the developers much kudos for the soundtrack. The soundtrack reminded me of an eerie mix of the laboratory of a mad scientist and a haunted house, which fits the game perfectly with the entire monster theme and all. Definitely a nice touch to the game!

Additional Comments

Flipn’ Monsters! is quick and easy to pick up and play, but there isn’t much more to it other than that. The depth of the game is somewhat lacking, but for $0.99 you really can’t go wrong with a fantastic casual game that you can easily pass around with friends. One of my beefs with the game though, is that there is no way to check your high scores, which I hope the developers will address in the near future with an update.

Conclusion

Flipn’ Monsters! is one of those games you will have fun with regardless of the amount of times you play it. It will work your memory and keep your adrenaline pumping as you try to beat the clock in either Classic or Arcade mode. Definitely one of my recommendations to casual gamers everywhere!