All the fun of poker was missing in the dozen or so matches that I have experienced. The length is a big factor in this boredom as games can go on for hours and you can still walk away without winning a cent. All the while, the characters repeat the dialogue over and over again. There is a vast number of personalities that each have around three unique lines, although in a single game, the phrases are repeated several times. The commentary is very bland and quite often the narrators use the wrong pro-nouns. For instance, they occasionally say "He's raising you.", even when you're putting in the chips and theres a number of players who haven't folded. I found myself turning off the volume and watched as my opponents perform clunky animations.
The characters look very blocky when putting chips into the middle of the table and one certain animation shows the player moving his arm in an ackward way. However, the character models have a bit of detail and the lighting is impressive.The backgrounds look polished, but are usually lacking anything interesting.
You're able to buy furnature and put it in your personal house which can also be puchased. This is a neat feature, but a short ways into the single-player, it isn't a big part of the game yet. Another different apect is the bluff minigame in which you attempt to show a poker face or show a bluffing face to trick your opponents. If you fail, you will give an expression that shows what you really have in your hand. This sounds great on paper, but during game-play it makes little difference. I have made my contenders fold in many cases when I showed that I had poor cards. You can also increase your skills in certain attributes, although most of them corrolate with the useless minigame.
Fortunately these are just first impressions and I have yet to jump into the online play. I will have a review up at some point, and it will be much more slick than this quick blog post.
