by Mike Favila, Reporter

I love playing poker, and I love video games, so this should have worked out quite well. (No Asian jokes please!) Poker Night 2 is Telltale Games’ next entry in the series. I got to play the PSN version for this review.   Like it’s predecessor, your character plays in first person, and you get to play against characters from well known game franchises. In this case, my opponents were Sam from Sam & Max, Brock Samson from The Venture Bros.  (hilariously voiced by Patrick Warburton), Ash Williams from The Evil Dead franchise (not Bruce, but a convincing Danny Webber) and Claptrap from Borderlands.   GLaDOS from Portal acts as the semi creepy robot dealer. There’s a few cameos from other games as well.  I love Ash in general, so his smart aleck manner in a poker game is a great fit.  Young Bruce Campbell seems like a great person to hang out with.  Then again, older Bruce Campbell seems pretty cool too. But I digress…

The games starts with a fun little introduction, like a Disney ride on acid. You meet up with Brock, and he takes you through winding basement hallways, where you eventually end up in the poker room. As you play, you can unlock in-game items within the different franchises like Borderlands 2. There are different incentives for each specific platform (Steam, XBOX, PSN). In my case, I won premium themes after achieving certain goals. Not the most exciting bonus, but it’s still nice to have content that wasn’t there before. Additionally there’s more traditional unlockable items within the game, such as poker chips, felts and deck designs. You can play Omaha or Texas Hold Em.

There’s not a lot of depth to this game, but that’s not really a negative for a poker game. To some degree, I expect them all to conform to a certain degree of play. You get your cards, you wait for the flop, watch the other players’ tells and play accordingly. Initially, it’s kind of cool to sit down and hear the banter back and forth between the characters, especially as they ask each other about their back stories. Seeing the dumb questions and wisecracks fly is definitely a highlight of Poker Night 2.

Unfortunately, if you just want to play through, this is not the game for you. There’s not really any way to skip to the next flop without waiting for the dialogue. I guess that’s good if you’re looking for a realistic poker experience, but part of the allure of playing video game poker is that you can move through it a little faster. You can’t adjust the speed at which the game moves. At one point, I was stuck in a dialogue scene between the characters for almost a full minute before I could do anything. At least you can adjust the volume of the music or dialogue, so you can mute it out if you want, but I actually found tha the dialogue helped pass the time if I was going to have to wait the game out anyway.

Another big issue is how often Poker Night 2 glitches and freezes. I can only speak for my PSN version, but it would freeze at least every 5 or so hands. Maybe it’s just loading the content, but I wish they would have figured out a smoother way to preload some of the game, so it would move faster. In spite of those drawbacks, i played until 2 am yesterday! Maybe it’s the nature of poker games that you can multitask while playing but I just ended up playing it in the background while catching up on work or other chores. What made me finally stop? Yes, you guessed it. Glitch.

I’m hoping that Telltale will update the game to have more unlockable players, or allow the player seating to be. The dialogue in the game is pretty hilarious, and definitely plays to all the franchises’ fans. If they were able to fix the glitching, Poker Night 2 would be infinitely more enjoyable. Honestly, I really wanted to like this game more, but the glitches are just very frustrating.

Rating:
ComicsOnline.com gives Poker Night 2  3 out of 5 stolen pots!