I know I often get to look at games that are outside traditional categories, but I think Arctic Stud Poker Run is about as far outside traditional categories as you can get. I am calling it an action arcade game, though I almost called it a Family title if it were not for the Teen rating, which I think is way too harsh even for the prudish ESRB. At most this should be E10+ given that it’s all harmless fun and nobody gets hurt even when being shot with missiles.
Missiles? Yes, this is the first poker game I’ve played with missiles for sure. But let’s start from the beginning because the game is actually based slightly in reality.
Apparently there are these events in rural communities (and they must mean really rural cause I grew up in one of those aforementioned places and never heard of this) where groups of people go to various pubs and businesses and get cards. At the end of the day, the person with the best poker hand wins a prize.
Arctic Stud Poker run is like that. Pretty much the core of the game is driving around on your snowmobile looking for cards that are scattered around the landscape. When you drive over one, it goes into your hand. Once you have five cards the computer tries to figure out if you want to change out a card for any new ones you find. It guesses right most of the time, but was a little frustrating sometimes since it does not seem to realize when you are trying to build a flush or a straight.
The maps you play on are all pretty diverse with lots of funny little things hidden away in the far corners like jumps or stuff to blow up or odd items like hot dogs to find and eat. There are some buildings like gas stations or lodges hidden in the various snowy landscapes too, some of which let you go inside or at least overtop.
Of course this is a race, so there are opponents. Once you get the best five cards you think you can find, you need to head for the finish line. Once someone crosses the finish line, their current hand is locked in so they can’t get any new cards. At that point a warning goes out to the rest of the players that someone has finished. Then everyone else has 90 seconds to cross the finish line if they want their cards to count. So there is some strategy about crossing the line. If you get a great hand early, you can cross the line and hope that nobody else has time to put together a better one. But if you have a mediocre hand, it might be best to keep searching for new cards until the last second because once you cross the line, you are out while others can keep playing for a while.
There is an adversarial relationship among the players. When you get close to another snowmobile you can shoot at them with machine guns, or missiles if you have found any scattered about. Other weapons include TNT and even snowballs. If you do enough damage you will knock them off their snowmobiles, which scatters all their cards. So if someone has the card you need, displayed at the top of the screen, you can try to rob it from them, though this is easier said than done given that you still have to grab the right card even if you knock down their hand, and others might have the same idea. Also, nobody really ever gets hurt in the game, so after a few seconds, the fallen rider is back on the saddle.
Graphically, the game is okay. The landscapes are snowy and cartoon like. There are some funny signs and things dotting the landscape to make it a little more fun, but nothing cutting edge by any means. This does go a long way to making the game playable by mere mortals on modest machines, as a 1.8Ghz processor is the minimum specification, which is the platform the game was tested with. There were no slowdowns or any other problems encountered other than a somewhat long load time at the start of each race.
The sounds in the game are a little weak. It’s passable though and far from bad.
The computer AI challengers are quite good, but not impossibly so. They know how to build a good hand and are not shy about being aggressive towards you and each other. However, it’s not too hard to outfox them, either by charting a rather obscure course or simply going full out to grab early cards and then avoiding them after that. And you pick up enough weapons to really give them a hard time. I suppose I was blown up a few times myself, though my cards were rarely stolen while I was down.
You can put bounties on other players, spending money from your collected prize pool as an offer to anyone who takes them down. This does not help much in the single player game, but comes into effect during multiplayer.
The single player game is a lot of fun, and can be played for hours on end or briefly on your lunch break. But the multiplayer mode is more fun, since humans are much more unpredictable. And I’ve run into tons of good players online, although finding a game is sometimes difficult.
As you win you can unlock new characters, including some truly wacky ones. This adds to the fun of the game. With a budget price of just $20, Arctic Stud Poker run is a terrific value. And then you can tell your friends that your favorite sport is full contact poker!