In our initial review of The Four Kings Casino and Slots we commented on how it was a brilliant piece of escapism to wind down with after a hard day. And perhaps best of all, it was free-to-play!
Four Kings: Video Poker is the video poker aspect of the overall casino, fully ripped out and made into its own game. In the process, it loses its free-to-play status – costing £4.19 – and all sense of what made the larger casino more enjoyable.
Make no mistake, this is an exact carbon copy of the video poker machines in The Four Kings Casino. Video poker involves being drawn five cards from a standard deck, and then seeing which you would like to keep or swap for a replacement, before seeing what your final hand is. All the traditional poker hands are there: Pair – as long as it is Jacks or better, two pair, three of a kind, all the way up to a Royal Flush.
Bets start at 200 chips and go up in the same increments up to a maximum bet of 1000. Kindly enough, at the start of the game you are given 50000 chips to either whittle away or make your fortunes with. Running out of chips isn’t the end of the game though. Instead you will receive a short message indicating that mistakes happen, before being given 50000 more. You can blow this as many times as you like too, and you will always be reimbursed.
This is the only real benefit to playing this version over the main casino game. In The Four Kings Casino if you lose all your chips you will need to wait 15 minutes in game time or for a daily spin. Here it is instantaneous.
Four Kings: Video Poker does also have a stats screen where you can view various details including hands won/lost, and the breakdown of winning hands.
Seriously though, that is it. The video poker dashboard is ripped straight from The Four Kings Casino and the sound effects are identical. The music is different and gone is the smooth jazz, replaced by some generic-sounding beats that can’t even be turned off in-game because there isn’t even an options menu.
There are no customisation options, no animations except for cards moving in and out of shot and no additional features whatsoever.
But what it does have is easy achievements. Ten of them for 100G each to be precise. Counter-intuitively, for one of the achievements, you will want to lose all your chips in your kitty, so it is best to aim for that one first. The rest are all pretty straight forward; win 100 hands, play 200/500 hands, and achieve a few specific hands.
And that really is all there is to Four Kings: Video Poker on Xbox. It’s a shell of the version that is available in The Four Kings Casino and Slots – that I hasten to add is free-to-play – and doesn’t offer anything substantial over that version. There is easy Gamerscore to be had, and that’s about it. You would be better off spending the £4.19 it costs to buy Four Kings: Video Poker and put it towards microtransactions for the larger casino instead.
You can buy Four Kings: Video Poker for £4.19 from the Xbox Store for Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S
