Developer: Baltoro Games
Publisher: Baltoro Games
Platforms: Switch
Tested on: Switch
Klondike Solitaire – Review
Solitaire has been one of those card games that has been around for as long as anyone can remember. The game is played solo, and you’ll have to try and create four series of cards, starting from the King all towards the Ace, all by alternating colors, before you can pile them up correctly by each type and color. This means, if you have a King of Hearts, you’ll have to place a Queen of Spades or Clovers on top of it, and so on. The rules are simple, but more than often, the cards are not in your favor, and thus you won’t make it until the end. Klondike Solitaire brings this classic game to the Switch, yet while the graphical prowess of the game looks good, the game does not feel optimized for Nintendo’s hybrid console at all.
Story
If you’re expecting an adventurous tale that hides behind the origin of Solitaire, you’ll be sorely disappointed. There is no story to be found here, or anything that closely resembles that. The card game has been digitized and created for the Nintendo Switch, and that’s all there is to it.
Graphics
The graphical prowess of the game certainly looks the part. There are many different card backs and fronts, different tables to play on, creating a set of options you can choose from. Of course, not all options are available from the start, but you’ll unlock items rather quickly. You can change the camera angle from a straight overview, to a somewhat crooked angle, creating a 3D effect of the table you’re playing on. The items in the background serve no purpose, but it’s fun to change the scenery now and then, even though it has no importance to the gameplay whatsoever.
Sound
The sound design of Klondike Solitaire is actually top notch. You’ll be able to enjoy fairly amusing background tracks, and the more you play, the more you unlock. Perhaps it would have been nice to have a bigger set list when first booting up the game, but you make progress quite fast, unlocking tunes in the process. Other effects are basic, but they are there nonetheless.
Gameplay
Klondike Solitaire is the Switch version of the traditional Solitaire game, in which you’ll have to create proper alternations of all the cards in a deck, to eventually place them all on their respective piles, allowing you to beat the game. Of course, more than often you’ll be stuck, creating an impossible to beat scenario. The latter is already where the first problems of this Switch game lie. It’s not the fact that you often can’t beat the game, that’s just the game itself, but the game won’t tell you if there are no more moves available, and this is probably due to the game’s extremely crappy hint system. The game will provide hints, that move one card to another stack, and when pressing the hint button again (when your cursor is on a card that triggers a hint) it might just move the same card back to the pile you took it from, creating an endless, useless loop of hints.
The second somewhat idiotic part lies in the fact that this game has no touch screen support. This game would have been perfect with touch screen controls, but for some reason it’s not implemented. Keep in mind that the free Windows version of Solitaire has touch screen support, but that game of course comes with ads, if you don’t purchase it. That being said, the controls feel tedious and annoying, safe for the double press function if you want to place a card on the ‘finish’ pile of its respective symbol and color. Of course, you can only do this with eligible cards. Sadly, if you add the asking price of around nine Euros/dollars to the equation, then you have yourself a very expensive Solitaire game, with no touch screen support, broken hints, no feedback if the game has no more moves possible, etc.
Not all is bad in Klondike Solitaire’s gameplay department, as you’ll have a lot of content to unlock, ranging from card fronts, backs, backdrops and songs, which do create somewhat of a goal to strive for. Sadly, with all the above in place, it feels somewhat redundant to have great striving goals, if the gameplay is somewhat shitty in an overpriced package.
Conclusion
Klondike Solitaire is a very expensive Solitaire game for Switch, with broken hints, no proper gameplay support and no touch screen capabilities, on a console that has just that – touch screen controls. The game does look good however, and the sound design is equally top notch. Sadly, these two factors do not redeem the piss-poor qualities of the game’s gameplay.
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