Texas Hold 'em Review (XBLA)

When you find decent people to play with that actually understand how to play, Texas Hold 'em on Xbox Live can be a lot of fun. Unfortunately, finding good playing partners is rather difficult. Other issues such as slow pacing and questionable AI in single player really hinder your enjoyment. I'd suggest skipping it at the 800 point pricetag.

Texas Hold 'em on Xbox Live Arcade does a few things right but a whole bunch of stuff wrong and it turns out that the negatives far outweigh the positives.

The good things include a decent tutorial mode and the fact you can play single player to learn the ropes before taking your game online. I also like the graphics. No cheesy looking character models or other fluff, just a table, some chips, and the cards.

But I can't recommend this for 800 points and heres why. Finding good people to play with online is a chore unless you exclusively play against people on your friends list. The vast majority of players simply do not know how to play or refuse to play correctly and it just isn't fun. This stems from the fact that when you aren't playing with your own money you have nothing to lose so people will go All In constantly and ruin the game. Another issue comes from the single player AI. Even the AI will go all in constantly or do stupid things like folding instead of checking when they are the big blind. The AI will have you yelling at your TV constantly. Also, it takes forever to play through a tournament or scenario in single player and you can't save and come back later. I'm talking several hours just to play through a scenario. You just get bored with it after a while.

This just really isn't a very good game and I can't recommend it. Wait for Activision's poker title instead.