Poker Night 2

Not that long ago I reviewed Poker Night at the Inventory, a celebrity Texas Hold ‘Em poker game that included video game related characters, such as Team Fortress 2’s The Heavy, or Penny Arcade’s Tycho. It’s simply a fancy poker game, with just the one mode, where what you live for is the next bit of funny banter between characters, or those once-in-a-lifetime moments, like The Heavy flipping over the table after a last card loss, and gunning everyone down with his minigun, or Tycho telling Max of Sam and Max fame all about his unhealthy interest in giraffes, which anyone familiar with Penny Arcade should know about.

It’d be easy to say that Poker Night 2 is the same game as the previous incarnation, since, after all, you are still literally playing the same game of Texas Hold ‘Em, only redone with a few new cards and tables, and a new cast of characters, but there are some major fundamental differences between the two games, even if, as I said, you’re still just playing poker.

With a new cast comes new lines, and, hopefully, hilarity.

The first major improvement to the franchise is the inclusion of a second style of poker, called Omaha. For those of you without poker knowledge, Texas Hold ‘Em is a special style of poker. In standard poker each player is dealt his or her own cards, but Texas utilizes a set of communal cards. At the start of a round every player is dealt two cards, called hole cards (if you’ve ever heard the phrase, ace in the hole, this gives you an idea of what it means). Bets are placed, and everyone who didn’t already have to pay a small amount called a blind, must match that to proceed. Three cards are then placed on the table, which every player will use to make a five card hand. This is called the flop. Another round of betting ensues, followed by a fourth card. This is followed by another round of betting, and then a fifth card is placed on the table. Assuming anyone is left at this point, a final round of betting is allowed, and then everyone still in the game must flip over their cards, where the best five card combination of the seven available cards (two hole cards and 5 community cards) wins.

That’s Texas Hold ‘Em. In itself, it’s a fun game. However, Omaha is a bit different. Rather than each player having 2 hole cards, each player gets four. The five community cards are still played in the same fashion as Texas, but there is one major twist that fouls up the idea of, say, having 3 of a kind in the hole, or a flush with 4 community cards. You see, in Omaha you must play 2 and only 2 hole cards, and 3 and only 3 community cards. That makes it quite frustrating when you have a King, Queen, and 10 in the hole, which would work nicely with the Ace and Jack found in the communal cards, but because of the 2/3 rule, you don’t have a high straight/royal flush, you actually have a high card (this has happened to me more than a few times).
 

While this might look like I have a great hand (a high straight), since this is Omaha, the best I have is a pair of Aces.

That’s improvement number 1, because doubling the play modes makes the game substantially better. Improvement 2 comes from an enhanced AI, or at least something like an AI that I’ll attribute an increase in difficulty to. You see, this game’s four celebrities are Brock Samson (from the Venture Brothers show), Claptrap (from the Borderlands series), Ash Williams (The Army of Darkness movie), and Sam (from the same Sam and Max series as Max in the first game), and each one has a different personality/playstyle. Brock and Sam both seem to be aggressive players that always have the cards to match. Ash is the one I’ve been most successful in baiting into betting big on bad cards, or basically calling his bluff, though he does seem to get pretty lucky on that fourth or fifth card. Claptrap bets big, but seems to fold a lot if you reraise on him.

The above personalities are further enhanced through the use of “tells” or some action that it supposed to let you know what the other character is “thinking.” Brock smashing his fist against the table and grimacing seems to proceed a fold, more often than not, but sometimes he calls. Sam may have his hat fly up into the air. Supposedly these tells give you an advantage, and they can be enhanced by purchasing a drink through a rewards system I’ll get to in a little bit, but I’m not so sure that’s how this all really works. I’ve seen Brock play a hand, which, based on the tell, I assumed was bad, only to find out he had excellent cards. Similarly, with Sam’s extremely noticeable tell, I’ve seen him fold a hand or lose poorly. This whole system may be more complex (or I’m overthinking it) than I realize, but the end result is that it was sustainably more difficult to win a tournament than in the previous game, and I found that I had to play for several hours before my first victory, which was on Omaha anyways, while I seemed to win every 2nd or 3rd tournament before.
 

I never really found drinks to be worth it, partly because of the cost, and partly because the tells never seemed to give me the kind of information I really wanted.

The third improvement concerns unlocking items. This happens in a couple of ways, but the first thing I’d like to cover is the tie ins between this game, Team Fortress 2, and Borderlands 2. The first game had several items you could unlock in Team Fortress 2 if you acquired them in Poker Night, which was ultimately the reason I bought the game, thanks to an achievement associated with unlocking The Heavy’s Iron Curtain weapon that entered you in a competition to win every game on Steam, which, given my frugal ways, was something I was more than happy to do. But back to the unlocks. In the first game there was a chance every tournament that a character would use a special item as the buy in, and whoever knocked out that character would receive the item. So if Tycho took The Heavy to the cleaners before you got a chance, tough luck. You would just have to wait until that item came up again. Now you must first complete a set of three randomly selected challenges, which unlocks the ability to acquire an item. From that point until you actually get it, a random character will put in his or her special item, giving you a chance each tournament.

In this game, winning items will give you something in both Team Fortress 2 and Borderlands 2.

At first I was a fan of this new system. The challenges were things that could be accomplished within a few full tournaments, such as beating an opponent with a higher kicker (you have the same hand, say a pair of Aces, but you have the next highest card, a King to his Queen), causing everyone to fold before seeing the first three cards, winning a tournament, or buying everyone a round of drinks. After that, it’s simply a matter of winning your next tournament to get the item (though that’s not the easiest task in the world). Then I came to a challenge I just couldn’t complete – knock another player out after he has gone all in where you win with a high card. I had done this a few times in the original game, mostly because those characters seemed to over bet or bluff quite often. Here, getting someone to go all on when they had nothing is pretty unlikely. Worse is the chance that, in a two person showdown, no one has a pair, straight, or flush. Between two people there are a total of 9 cards, and only two can be the same (one of each player’s hole cards). You can’t have more than 4 consecutive cards, otherwise someone has a straight, so if you have an Ace/King, and the other player has a King/Queen, then a 10, 9, 8, 7, and 5 would be adequate for this challenge. Note that that requires 8 specific cards out of 13. Oh, and I’m pretty sure this isn’t even possible in Omaha. The worst part was this was my final challenge for my final item. The solution ended up requiring quite a bit of cheating. You see, one of the flaws/exploits/saviors in this game is the ability to Alt+F4 before a hand ends to not have it saved, allowing you to come back and replay the whole thing. That’s great if you are really trying to get something, or you just want to win quickly. So when you get another player low enough at the end of a tournament that he is going to go all in every time, you just keep replaying the hand over and over again until you complete the challenge. In my case it took over 2 hours of playing 30 seconds to 1 minute at a time before I had high enough cards and a stupid pair didn’t show up at the last second. Note, that’s 2 hours in game time, not real world time, so there was plenty of rebooting the game going on there.

Most of the challenges are pretty straight forward, and easily enough accomplished, especially since you can complete them across multiple tournaments.

Back to improvements, and away from rants about not including something to reset challenges in case you include a case that is so improbable it’s not going to happen during the course of a normal game. Like its predecessor, you can unlock table felts and cards to change the appearance of the game. This game adds to that chips. If you unlock and equip all three items from the same set, one base set and one per celebrity, for a total of 6, you’ll change the map. The Venture Brothers gives the map a disco/70s theme. Borderlands makes the games all borderlands like. The Army of Darkness turns the place into a haunted house, basically. Sam and Max’s set gives off a great detective noir. And GlaDOS’ set, for she is the dealer in this celebrity game, turns the whole place into a test chamber from Portal. Along with these special maps come unique elimination events and tournament win celebrations. Normally when a player busts out, a joking remark is made, then he gets up and leaves. Bust out when it’s GlaDOS’ map and you’ll be sent through a portal to some other place in the room. Win, and you’ll find several Portal turrets appearing in the room, all with their red targeting laser focusing on you. The Borderlands set features elimination by Steve, another character from the game who does nothing more than say “Hey-oh.” Usually that one consists of nothing more than a rocket launcher full of confetti fired at the first loser, but it does make for a pretty interesting moment when Claptrap is the first to go, and there is this whole dramatic scene. Likewise, the remaining maps have their special eliminations and wins as well.

You may be wondering how you go about unlocking these things, since obviously the redone levels and special scenarios seem like fun little additions to the game. That’s where the improvement comes in. Previously, you had to win enough tournaments to unlock new cards and tables, with the final item taking 21 wins to unlock. Now you buy everything, including the tell enhancing drinks, with coins. You get coins by finishing better than dead last, with the amount scaling by how well you do. The winner gets 100 coins, while second gets 50, third 20, and fourth 10. Since some of the items in sets cost several hundred coins, it’s apparent that you’ll need to win plenty of tournaments to acquire items quickly, but at least with this setup, you gain something even if you don’t finish first every time, allowing you to still unlock everything.

Okay, why hasn't someone produced these as real playing cards yet?!?! I mean, look at the Queen, it's awesome! Oh, and the King involves cake!

Overall Poker Night 2 is a game that has improvements over the original. That ranges from the major improvements discussed so far, to things like having colored text that is different for each character, a la another Telltale game, The Walking Dead, and doubling the text line, which is good if you’re me and need to take screen shots of all the funny lines. It does still seems like there are way too few character lines, especially for the basic functions like checking or calling, which can happen a few dozen times per hand, which was an issue in the last game, but for the most part the back and forth was funny, and a bit distracting from the overhaul in the difficulty level. One of my favorite bits involved several characters questioning Claptrap about having guns in vending machines and how dangerous that is, the rebuttal to which highlighted how dangerous candy is to your health. The game is perhaps a little less fun than the previous because of the increased difficulty, but the additional things like the unlocks, better lines, etc., make up for it. It’s one of those games that’s nice to play in about 20 minute increments, when you’ve got some spare time to kill, but don’t want to commit to a huge game – 7 out of 10.

So, the final breakdown:

Score: 7/10

Suggest Price: $2.50 (Lowest was $0.99)

*****

For more Poker Night 2, check out this collection of screenshots otherwise unused in this review. Click on any one for a large image.