Deck Buster seems to be another small game churned out by the Knizia factory. Once more we have a property that Knizia has stamped his personal brand on, that seems to detract from that brand. Personally, if I were churning out properties I would much rather brand myself on fewer high quality games than to simply flood the market place with many cheap games. I will reflect on this below.
Gameplay
If you know how to play poker then you’re half way there. The premise of the game revolves around three lines that can hold up to five cards each, and that you will draw cards randomly and allocate them to those three lines in an attempt to form poker hands. When you complete the lowest line it clears sending the above lines downwards. Upon clearing you gain points and a number of additional cards. The game ends when you run out of cards.
There are two varieties of game, one restricts the types of cards to 8s and higher, and the other uses all cards with 2s as wilds. You have now learned the extent of the game and its various subtleties.
Implementation
For a game with very little depth, it is nevertheless nice to see efforts taken to create a lovely presentation. The animations are smooth and seamless, and all the graphics are of high quality. So you get points for that.
Unfortunately I can’t really bring myself to making a recommendation for this game. In the length of time it took you to read this review roughly expresses the amount of time it took me to lose interest in this game. The redeeming features of presentation are never enough to overcome deficiencies in gameplay.
Perhaps what really irritates me is that this is theoretically a game out of the mind of one of the eminent game developers. Either Knizia’s just given up, sold out (there are enough punters on the micromarket of Apple that a basic and descent game is probably able to make a return), or simply just willing to place his name on anyone who pays franchising fees.
Neither should it be inferred that I’m a complex game snob. I can certainly appreciate games where the simplicity of the rules either produces emergent complexity or is otherwise original in concept or delivery, though they may not be my game of choice.
Verdict
2/10: poor concept, good delivery, enough said.
Deck Buster,Review By: Angelus Morningstar
Completed a Masters of Jurisprudence at University of Sydney. I am an activist, dramaturge, and instigator of strange mind experiments.
I’m a storyteller, and I mostly tell stories about people. These aren’t always stories you’ll find written down, they can be stories told over a coffee, told by firelight, told through art act and lifestyle. Of course, we all tell stories. We love our little fictions, lies and dreams – I just like to embellish a bit more than most.
My current project of substantial size is called Eidolon. It can be found here:
http://www.eidolon.me
This is similar to some of the solitaire variants in Knizia's Blazing Aces, which is a great collection of "small" games played with a standard Poker Deck. The version I enjoyed most played similar to this, but gave you the choice as you flipped over each card to either play to the current row (up to 5 cards), or to abandon the current row and start a new one. It's a game with a theoretical "perfect" score, but has a nice bit of skill involved in raising your median score. That ruleset was one out of about 16 in my paper copy of Blazing Aces, which I bought for around $20. Even though it works out to a roughly equivalent price, the idea of having a single game as an App doesn't seem like an equivalent value