The Four Kings Casino and Slots

Genre: Simulation / Compilation / Casino / Card Games

Players: 1-20 (Online)

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Review:

WARNING: THIS GAME HEAVILY PUSHES MICROTRANSACTIONS

The Four Kings Casino and Slots is a free-to-play Casino Simulator released on PC and PlayStation 4 in 2015 and ported to Xbox One and Nintendo Switch in 2020. This game has players walking around a virtual casino, playing any of its various games.

When I say various, I mean it – probably this game’s greatest strength is the wide variety of games present here. There’s Poker, Blackjack, Baccarat, Craps, War, Video Poker, Video Blackjack, Bingo, Keno, Bowling, and no less than ten different varieties of slot machine. In addition, just to complete the scenario, players can wander the casino, socialize with other players, purchase clothing items in various shops, dance in the casino’s club, and even check out your room, though there’s little in the way of actual gameplay that happens in any of these spaces.

I know what you must be thinking – a free game, with tons of different included games, and even a simulated space? What’s the catch? And wow, is there ever a catch.

Firstly, the presentation here is pretty bad. This is a game that first released in 2015, and I suspect it looked clunky and dated back then too, but even more so now, with awkward animations, terrible textures, low-poly characters and environments, and plenty of embarrassing moments like the camera frequently popping in your character’s skull and showing their disembodied eyes. Yet despite the low quality of the visuals on display here, the performance is abysmal, with framerates that get atrociously low and frequent long loading times. The sound is unimpressive too – the game tries to mimic the sounds of a bustling casino, but more often than not you’re treated to a dull silence backed by uninspired, forgettable music.

This game was clearly poorly-optimized for Nintendo Switch, which goes beyond the game’s unforgivable performance issues. There’s no touchscreen support, even though many games could certainly use it. The text is tiny on-screen, even tinier in handheld mode. The menus are clunky and make it difficult to navigate. And don’t expect anything even resembling intuitive controls in things like the Bowling game. Oh, and despite the unimpressive visuals, this game takes up nearly 4.5GB of your Nintendo Switch’s limited memory. Yikes.

And then of course there’s the elephant in the room, the microtransactions in a gambling game set in a casino… look, I understand that a free-to-play game needs to make its money somewhere, but come on. The overwhelming majority of the games included here involve no skill at all, and are completely down to chance. This is just gambling, plain and simple, and the only thing that separates this from “real” gambling are that players can spend money but stand no chance of making real money, and it’s not illegal to peddle this game to kids.

Look, I’m not opposed to Casino videogames, but I have to draw the line at a game that lets children gamble with real money (no, “T for Teen” rating, you’re useless here, go home). And even if I was okay with that, The Four Kings Casino and Slots manages to make things even worse with terrible controls, a terrible presentation, terrible performance, and poor optimization for the Nintendo Switch. This game’s one saving grace is its wide variety of game types, but even that is heavily padded out by variations on completely random slot games. Even if you love the idea of a virtual casino, this game will let you down, hard.

tl;dr –The Four Kings Casino and Slots is a free-to-play Casino Simulation with a wide variety of casino and card games, but that wide variety of games is the only saving grace here, as everything else is a mess of terrible graphics, poor performance, awkward controls, and poor optimization for Nintendo Switch… all in a microtransaction-filled game that’s gambling where players can spend real money but not earn it. Even fans of Casino games will find this one to be severely lacking.

Grade: D+

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