I don’t know about you, but when I’m bored for a few minutes, the first app I usually open up is my free solitaire program and play a round or two of klondike or demon solitaire. This has always served me well and I have never thought about buying a Solitaire Card game. When I picked up this game to review, a question popped up in my mind: would I ever pay for a solitaire app?
Once this game had finished downloading I fired it up, to see what it had to offer, and here are a few of the things I found:
First off, it has a cool opening screen of bridges and buildings (a city) built with cards. Now normally, I don’t really care about the opening screen, because they are generally no indication of the game’s actual quality. However, I did think this was a cool way to start off a card game. In a card game you don’t have much story, plot, or graphical needs, so many people won’t trouble with a nice opening screen for it.
The second thing that struck me was the number of solitaire styles available. This game has a total of fifteen distinct versions of solitaire, and for each it has variable rules. For instance, for Klondike solitaire, there are a total of twelve versions, such as deal 3 or deal 1, how many passes you get, etc.
Third, each version of solitaire has a tutorial on how to play it, and the tutorial is done interactively in-game. No rulebook to read here, it all gets taught as you play. I love this, and now know 13 more ways to play solitaire then I used to.
Fourth, This game is very smooth and pretty. I have not had any lag while playing on my 3GS at all. The animations for dealing, moving, and winning are all very smooth and sensitive.
Now comes the downside however; the price. This beautiful game comes with a pricetag of almost eight dollars! For a solitaire game, I can not see many ways to improve on this program, however at $7.99 they are pricing perfection quite high.
Presentation & Graphics
This game has the smoothest and crispest animation of any card game I’ve ever used
Sound
There’s not much to say about a card game’s audio, unless you want me to go into detail about how it has amazing shuffling sounds, and how moving a card from one stack to another sound’s so realistic! I’m giving this game four and a half stars because they did not overdo the audio for a card game
Gameplay
Everything is crisp and smooth, the games all have in-game tutorials and scoring systems, and there is an online scoreboard with which to compare against other players worldwide. Pure win
Gamelife
With the sheer number of rules and variations of games, I will be playing this for weeks and months to come
Game Rating
Yes, my first 5 star review! This is the best card game I have ever used. I have literally no complaints about it, and would recommend it to all my friends. There is no better Solitaire game out there to this day. I have to force myself to put this down to get to my other games that need reviewing, because I keep going back to my first love of solitaire, done so well in this game. I have found that the answer to my earlier question regarding paying for card games to be a resounding YES.
This second rating is for the game after the price. I find that paying almost eight dollars for a card game to be a bit high, and for that I would take two stars off. It’s an amazing game, however it is priced very high.
