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»UNO 52
"Just like being back at day camp."
This isn’t an easy review to write. Making a general recommendation of
“if you like Uno you’ll probably like Uno 52” is easy enough, and it
holds true for this game, but how do you translate into a number score?
Oh well, boring you with that question isn’t going to make it any
easier. Uno 52 is a fairly ambitious game for what it is, trying to add
a lot (maybe too much) to the basic Uno card game. If you sought a
review of a game you probably know the basic concept of Uno, but just
in case, Uno is a game played with special cards featuring numbers and
colors. The goal is to match cards with the one in a pile shared by the
players and to be the first to get rid of all your cards.
Uno 52 is a new take on Uno, combining it with poker. Instead of just
having number cards and special cards, you also get the face cards from
a standard 52 deck (hence the name), with both the Uno colors and the
four symbols from normal cards. Playing the game can be kind of
confusing; you basically have to play Uno and poker simultaneously.
What you do is lay down a card a turn like in Uno, then you get to
place another card in your poker hand. However, which cards you can
place in your poker hand is decided by Uno rules, you can only swap
cards with ones that have the same color or symbol. This makes things
rather convoluted, especially since putting a card into the poker hand
every turn is vital to winning the Uno game, considering it lets you
eliminate two cards a turn, as opposed to the standard one. Making a
strategy that allows you to win both Uno and poker may very well be
more complex that you’ll want to bother with, especially since the
poker aspect is treated as more of a bonus than equal to the Uno part.
Once you understand/ignore the Uno and poker fusion, there’s a decent
amount of play modes in Uno 52. You can customize the normal game quite
a bit, adjusting the CPU difficulty and entering timed or endurance
modes. There is also a challenge mode, where you are given specific
objectives to fulfill during a game or series of games. In addition,
there is a mode where you play Solitaire with Uno cards. The problem
is, the play modes don’t really change the game all that much, except
for Solitaire mode you’re playing the same Uno/poker combo with a
slightly different emphasis. A story or career mode that went beyond a
small amount of isolated challenges would have been nice. Basically,
how much you’ll enjoy the gameplay comes down to how into Uno you are.
The graphics in Uno 52 are simple and straightforward. You can choose
from a few background images, but the graphical core of the game is the
cards. Characters are only identified by name, pretty much all you see
during play is the cards of each player. The cards are big and easy to
identify, though. Sound is much like the graphics, you can choose from
a few different music tracks, and other than that you just have the
sound effects of cards being dealt and chips being taken. The graphics
and sound definitely are exceptional, but they do everything they need
to for a card game.
Like gameplay, replay value will depend pretty much entirely on how
much you like Uno. If you just want to keep playing Uno the poker twist
and amount of options will let you play for awhile without getting
bored, but I personally became tired of the game quickly and didn’t
feel drawn to playing again and again. A more cohesive use of all the
different options, such as a story mode, could have given the game a
lot more value. There is a multiplayer mode, but no online play, which
is disappointing since the game’s graphically simplistic and
multiplayer focused nature would have made an online mode easy to do
and possibly added significantly to the replay value.
Overall, Uno 52 is a decent choice if you just want to play Uno with a
new twist, but doesn’t have much to offer if you aren’t already really
into the game. The poker twist given to Uno is overly complicated and
in many ways hurts the game instead of helping it. The game does what
it sets out to, be a portable version of Uno with an added gameplay
mechanic, but not much more. The game just begs for the traditional
review line for games like this, so here it is: if you really love Uno
than Uno 52 is worth considering, but if you don’t break out the
colorful cards every opportunity you get, there’s really no reason to
bother.
Article by: KI Simpson
Posted on: Jul. 30th, 2007 |
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Review Recap |
| Gameplay |
| Does what you’d expect an Uno game to do and does it fairly well, but it still isn’t that great. |
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Graphics |
| Nothing special or eye catching, but nothing that looks particularly bad either. |
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Sound |
| Just a few generic tracks for everything in the game, not much more evolved than Tetris for the original Game Boy. |
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Replay Value |
| Decent amount of variations you can give the game, but no real motivation to play each variation. |
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