Developer: Ripstone Games
Publisher: Ripstone Games
Platforms: PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PC, Switch
Tested on: Switch
Poker Club (Switch) – Review
While you could already enjoy playing Poker Club on your trusty consoles and PC, Poker Club has now made its arrival on the Nintendo Switch. Now you can play a game of poker wherever you want. You only need a working internet connection to start playing poker against players from around the world with your handheld console. Sadly, the Switch version suffers a lot from the its limited capabilities.
Story
With Poker Club being a game that’s all about the game of poker, there is no story to be found throughout the whole game. There is a campaign mode where you can climb up the ranks by playing in various events, but there’s no story that gets unlocked by participating in these events. The only thing you can do is play poker, rank up, and earn new items to customize your avatar. By going through this campaign and defeating players from all over the world, you make your own story as a rising poker star.
Graphics
Where the game is advertised to offer “Stunning Next-Gen visuals”, this certainly isn’t the case for the Nintendo Switch version. Poker Club looks awful compared to all other versions. Every player’s avatar shows each interaction, from looking at your cards to increasing your bets; or switching from betting to simply checking, which certainly is a nice touch. The game wants to look very realistic with all these realistic interactions between the players, but this is pretty much impossible for the Switch’s hardware. The cards look rather blurry, the player avatars look bad, and some things in the menus are unreadable on the Switch’s own screen. All the interactions add to the immersion of the whole game, but it simply looks awful on the Switch.
Sound
The game has only one track for the menus, and this will get boring pretty fast. The upside is that this will make you want to leave the menus as fast as possible, which does make you start playing faster. In-game, you’ll hear some music playing in the background, and not much more. Each command in the game of poker is voiced, so you will constantly hear your opponents saying ‘check’, ‘call’, ‘raise’, or ‘fold’ according to their decisions. The game still lacks some sound effect(s) indicating it’s your turn, making it easy to miss your turn when not paying attention, as it can take quite a while before it’s your turn again.
Gameplay
Poker Club is an online poker game for PC and consoles that pits you against players from all over the world, on all platforms with cross-platform and cross-generation support. This also means that you’ll always need a working internet connection, and for consoles such as the Nintendo Switch, you’ll also need an online subscription to be able to play this game as it only features online play. With Poker Club being all about the game of poker, the controls are easy with only a handful of commands. The difficulty in this game lies in the tactical gameplay of the game of poker itself, which is all dependent on the cards you are dealt and your ability to bluff.
In Poker Club, you can make your way up the ranks in the PCC Poker Tour. In this ‘Campaign’, you can take part in various activities, varying from back-room games in a pub to big-money main events. Each event offers you a few missions in the form of targets. These vary from winning a certain amount of hands to cashing out with a big amount of cash. These targets offer you some goals at each table. Some of these can be quite tricky to obtain. For instance, when you need to steal blinds, you need to be in front of the blinds, and you need to get everyone to fold their cards. With this being a free online poker game with real opponents, most people won’t act as they’d normally do when real money is involved, and thus some tactics will not work in a game such as this. By clearing targets, you’ll unlock new events with higher stakes, until you clear them all, which will definitely keep you busy for quite a while. Another downside of the game being fully online is the slow progression, with everyone having to think over their turn, which can take a long time.
With everything you do at a game table, you earn experience, and you’ll constantly level up while playing. Even folding your cards grants you a small amount of experience. As you level up, you’ll unlock a lot of clothing and accessories to customize your avatar. At first, your avatar will look pretty standard, but after leveling up a few times, you can really give your avatar its own unique appearance.
When you first start the game, you get 50.000 credits to play with. Each event has a buy-in that you have to pay to join a game. With this buy-in, an additional fee of 10% is taken by the game for no reason, meaning you have to pay 1.100 credits to join an event with a buy-in of 1.000 credits. Each day, you’ll get a daily log-in reward that gets higher by logging in multiple days in a row. We didn’t experience what would happen when you run out of cash, but we do know that you’ll get the log-in reward daily, so you can play again each day after logging in for the first time.
Aside from the campaign, you can also take part in standard Sit & Go tournaments with different buy-ins where you can join a table at any time. On special occasions, time-limited tournaments will take place. For example, at the time of writing, there was a No Limit New Year tournament where you could take part in qualifying matches to obtain a place in this tournament that will start at a specific time and date This means that you need to be able to play during a specific period to make your qualification worthwile.
Sadly, the game does suffer from a bug that prevents you from seeing what cards you have, leaving the cards blank. With this bug, we had the mention of “pocket pair” along with our cards, which should mean we had two of the same cards in our hands, so we called all bets in the hope of winning this game. Sadly, at the end of the round, the game eventually showed us our cards with them being a six and a nine, which was not a pair, and resulted in a complete loss. Luckily, this game is free-to-play after the initial purchase, so no real money was lost with this bug.
Conclusion
Poker Club wants to offer you the most immersive poker simulation experience, and the PC, PS4 and Xbox One versions look very good, but the Switch version definitely suffers from the console’s limited hardware capabilities. Even though we loved all the interactions between the player avatars, it all looks rather bad on the Switch. Aside from the graphics and the blank cards bug, the game plays well and offers you a good poker experience. We did enjoy being able to play this game in handheld mode, while we were doing other stuff in the background. Poker Club is a great poker game that pits you against players from all over the world in various events, but if have the option to buy it on other platforms, we’d recommend avoiding the Switch version.
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