Not much here that I can see
I bought this because Griffins hardware products and website have always shown attention to detail and good quality for the money, and because I wanted to test purchasing from the phone.
I may be just missing something, but the attraction - indeed, the whole point - of this app completely eludes me.
First, gameplay, or lack of it: Its a solitaire 5-card draw game, which doesnt make a lot of sense. With no one to bet against, there is no point in a second round of betting on the draw, and accordingly, the game doesnt give you one. So you bet between 1 and 5 credits from an initial budget of 1000, see what your first 5 cards are, discard some, and see your final hand. For the most part, the action then consists of watching your credit amount slowly get whittled down, occasionally to be bumped back up a ways by the random straight, flush, or full house. (If you played this for a really long time, youd get a definite thrill out of how far up your tally would rise when you finally hit a straight flush or four of a kind, but it would only be a thrill because it would contrast so vividly with the endless hours of hypnotic boredom watching hands go by.
So basically, without opponents, there is nothing you can influence except the amount of your bet and the discards. The amount of the bet feels irrelevant in that betting the 5 credit max, it might take a hundred hours to slowly go bust or hit one of the big hands, while at 1 credit, the boredom would last 5 times as long. The discard choices feel pointless because those are really a matter of playing knowable odds. I dont know the odds, so I guess that I could get some experimental satisfaction out of playing for a few months and getting a sense of them, or I could just look them up in 5 minutes, in which case my actions in the game would become entirely irrelevant.
And the animations are fluid but comically gratuitous like a bad PowerPoint presentation. Do we really need the Draw button to slide in and out from the wings every hand? And the "trails" effect of your bankroll diminishing starts out sort of annoying, eventually becomes a little soothing when you hit the hypnotic stage, then became for me a little annoying again because of its irrelevance.
Somehow, Griffin has produced a game that consists solely of the elements of Poker that dont matter at all without the context of competition: luck of the draw and nonexistent currency. Changing the units from $ to credits makes sense for international appeal, but somehow also feels ironically like they have removed the only part of the game that could have elicited any reason to care, a sense of money changing hands. Unless you like trancelike meditation states for games (which is completely legit, but id opt for some headphones and a Phillip Glass CD instead), you should probably avoid the sense of your money changing hands to Griffin here.
I hope that this is an embarrassing mistake for Griffin, and they put some focus on offering some games that live up to their brand.
Ramatsu about
5 Card Touch