Solitaire

Genre: Compilation / Card Game (Solitaire)

Players: 1

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Review:

The straightforward-named Solitaire, released on Nintendo Switch in 2018, is a Compilation of three different types of Solitaire Card Games – Spider Solitaire, Klondike Solitaire, and Freecel Solitaire. As these games are all classic card games and likely older than anyone currently reading this review, I’ll be focusing mainly on the presentation, features, options, and performance of this game.

The presentation in this game is decent but relatively unspectacular. Players can choose one of two card types (a more traditional style and a larger-print, more simple style) and one of four backgrounds, each with some minor animation or flourish, like steam rising from a coffee cup or the moving shadows of trees. No matter which background you pick, your gameplay will be backed by calm lounge music, and completing a game will result in cheesy, out-of-place fanfare.

Gamepad controls here are decent but have a few minor issues – namely, there’s no shortcut for common commands like drawing a card from the deck, and if you’re trying to select one card from a stack and overshoot, trying to move back up the stack results in going all the way back to the top and starting over. Similarly, the touchscreen controls mostly work well, with minor issues. Namely, tapping the deck to draw or tapping a card to have it automatically go to a designated spot seems to briefly be misread as adjusting the camera before the game understands what you’re trying to do. Nothing major, but worth mentioning. On the positive side of things, this game allows players to zoom in and out the camera and pan around the playing field, which is a nice touch you don’t often see in these games.

The three games here do not come with any sort of instructions or tutorials, so you’d better know how to play before starting, or look up a tutorial online. For options,Spider only allows for Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced modes (determining the number of suits you play with), and offers no game variants. Klondike only offers the draw-one and draw-three variants, and Freecel offers no variants at all. In addition, it bears mention that there’s no “undo” option or “hint” option, so not only had you better know what you’re doing when you play, you’d better not make a mistake.

There are two other issues with this game that I feel I should note. First, this game does offer Online Leaderboards, but I suspect that they are not working properly – I completed a game of each type, and found that my entry was the only one on the leaderboards. So either I’m the only person to have gotten this game and completed a single game of solitaire in the three years it’s been out… or more likely, the leaderboards simply aren’t working.

The other issue I have is that despite the lack of anything particularly taxing on the Nintendo Switch hardware, this game still has frequent, frustrating loading times. It’s nothing truly outlandish, but the simple presence of these loading screens seems like an oddity in a game that really should allow instant access to its simple games.

For the $10 asking price, Solitaire is a bit low on features, and there are a few issues with the features that are offered here. If you can get this game when it goes on sale, it’s not a terrible trio of card games, but it is far from a great one

tl;dr – Solitaire is a Compilation of three Card Games: Spider Solitaire, Klondike Solitaire, and Freecel Solitaire. The versions of the games on offer here are mostly decent, but this game is overall low on features, and what features are included here have some issues. It’s not a terrible package, but not great either.

Grade: C-

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