Nerdful Things – ‘Just Deal With It!’ Review

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First Impressions

My family and I love the PlayLink games on PlayStation – we’re particularly fond of Knowledge is Power and the Decades follow-up.  That’s You! is okay but is better for adults.  Hidden Agenda is a bit more in-depth and annoyingly doesn’t work on Remote Play (my PS4 resides in the bedroom so I connect via Remote Play on my laptop or the PSTV) but I do like it – I seem to be the only one in the house, unfortunately.  Having bought the Ticket to Ride board game a while back, the console version was a welcome addition given the various expansions (the board game expansions are pretty bloody expensive and take up a load of space) and there’s no need to set up or end up dropping pieces and hunting for them under the sofas!  Frantics is pretty decent but we haven’t played much of it.  Uno is pretty decent too.

So, as you can see, we have a good chunk of the PlayLink enabled titles so we added Just Deal With It! to our collection.  So far, it’s okay.  Not worth the full price tag but if you can grab it in a sale then go for it.  Around £8 seems a decent enough sum.  Any more and I’d say forget it.  We played a few rounds of Texas Hold ’em, Crazy 8s and Blackjack.  Having never played Rummy before (that I can recall) I didn’t enjoy it as much as not only did I have to try and work out how to play it, we all were a bit confused so it didn’t go as smoothly as could be hoped for.  We’ll revisit it at some point.

Blackjack was pretty good – not a lot you can say about it given the odds and luck required to win.

Hearts just confused the hell out of us – granted it was getting late and we were all tired, but still…

 

 

Gameplay

As usual, there’s a dedicated app to be downloaded from the Play Store or App Store depending on if you’re an Android or iPhone user respectively.  I had a few connectivity issues with my phone but a reboot of my handset seemed to sort it out and it’s been fine of several plays since.  The app is quite nice in that it tracks the number of games you’ve played and how many wins you have had as well.

The game has a total of 46 trophies (one of which is platinum).  So far, we have unlocked 40.  It’s a bit of a grind and quite frustrating as you have little input into the latter few as it’s all luck dependant.  We need three poker related ones, one blackjack and one hearts related one to get the platinum.

I’m not going to detail the rules for each game type as that’ll get pretty boring so I’ll give a general overview.

Each game mode allocates players to a particular team – red, blue or some other sets of symbols and so on.  On your device, you will periodically be assigned missions to complete as individuals or as a team and these can vary from being asked to take all of another player’s chips, earning x amount of chips, going bust and so on.  You have a set time to accomplish this and, if you’re successful you can be awarded multipliers to boost your winnings or bombs.  Bombs can be used to benefit or hinder players.  You can lob a smoke bomb meaning a player’s cards are obscured by smoke and they must blow into the microphone of their device in order to clear it.  You can chuck jelly at someone and they have to wipe their screen clean or you can give yourself or a teammate a shield to deflect an incoming bomb.  They’re a fun and interesting addition but can get tedious if you’re getting ganged up on.  You can disable these at the start of a game, thankfully.

At the start of each game you have a skippable tutorial to help you grasp the rules should you wish.  Again, these can be disabled when setting the game up.  The voiceover reminds me of Aleksander Orlov (Compare the Meerkat).

All in all, you get Blackjack, Crazy 8s, Hearts, Rummy and Texas Hold ’em.  They can be played locally or you can go online and have a local/online mix should you have any mates that are a) online and b) own the game [possibly c) who can be bothered to play)]

There’s not really much else to be said.

Verdict

Games can get a bit boring as there’s nothing at stake.  There’s no real consequence of going all in all the time as, if you lose, you can just buy back in.  The only thing that may deter you is you normally have to sit out the subsequent round but that’s no biggie.  There’s nothing to actually keep you interested.  I love playing poker but this was a swing and a miss.  Even Blackjack is a lacklustre affair.

The only game we all enjoyed was Crazy 8s or ‘Switch’ as we know it.

So, short and sweet, if you’re tempted to pick this up only do so in a sale as it’s just not worth full whack.  If you’re a trophy hunter, this should be fairly easy provided luck is on your side but there are far better games that are on PlayLink.  Even though there’s no real consequence to any videogame – it’s not like I’m going to become a millionaire from winning ten games of Knowledge is Power in a row but there’s at least a great feeling of winning in games like that.  In this, I couldn’t really care if I won or lost.  Take Rummy for example; we must have played about fifty rounds before I scored ANY points.  By the time I’d scored I had lost all interest as there was no major incentive for  me here as I was about four hundred points behind.

In a nutshell, I reckon that as soon as I get the platinum trophy, this game will be deleted from my harddrive.

EDIT: maybe it would be better with more people and alcohol involved?

 

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—The Trying Scotsman has a ‘Don’t Be A Dick’ policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—