The good the bad and the ugly on World Championship Poker 2.
The good:
1 - Variety: The variety of poker games played is very nice. You will be challenged with your current trendy pick of Texas Hold'em but you will also be able to play games like 7 stud, hi-lo, lowball, pineapple, crazy pineapple, Razz, and variations of these and many more games. If you're wanting to just simply play Texas Holdem you will be able to do so 80% of the time since you can pick and choose your games but you will be forced to play some non-holdem games.
2 - Price: WCP2 is selling for $19.99 US and for the money you won't find a better console poker game.
3 - Career mode: For those of you like me who love career modes in their games WCP2 provides such a fix. You start off playing side games in your parents basement and gradually work your way up to the high-end pads. Eventually you can face off against the professor and fosilman as you gain respect.
4 - Poker: Simply put, it's a poker game and all poker games get a bonus point here since it is almost improbable to screw up the basics of a poker game. So even if everything else in the game is horrible you still have the fact that you can fire up the game and play several other artificially generated opponents for some poker fun.
5 - AI: Speaking of artificially generated opponents, the AI in WCP2 is worth taking a shot at this game. If you are a beginner to the game of poker you might find it a bit challenging at first but if you are a novice or better this game will provide you just enough challenge to give you a stressful night once in a while. No crazy all-in on the first hand of the tournament kind of moves that you will see every time in a free online tournament these days which makes this game have meaningful tournaments.
6 - Saved games: What I do like about this game is you don't have to save your game after every match so if you get nailed early you can reload your last saved game which doesn't take but 20 seconds and bam you're back in action.
The bad:
1 - Voice Acting: You will cringe, you will beg the gods to make it stop, and eventually you will just mute it and put on some tunes. You have a few characters "personalities" to choose from such as the college student, veteran old-timer, and others. Each character you play against also is one of these personalities and each have a set amount of verbal responses to situations in a game. They are some of the worst sounding voice jobs and the variety is slim. The announcer / play-by-play man is horrific as well referring to everyone as "player" and having a creative dialog that rivals a monk.
2 - Animation: The overall graphics are fine nothing great nothing bad but the character movements are a bit off. You can see characters fidget or move in their seats which is fine but there are moments, and they spring up often, that the game seems to get confused between wanting to move, sit still, make a bet, or give off a tell and it results in an epileptic seizure for a moment. In a game like this you might think it's a tell but the same movement comes before a raise, a call, or a fold. It's purely random and annoying.
3 - Fixed limit games: There are too many games that are not pot limit or no limit. You might ask the question "so what?" but if you have 8-20+ players in a game where you can only bet $50 and then raise that same amount you're in for HOURS of dull game play. When you get down to the last few players and you all have over 5 grand in chips you can imagine how long it's going to take to win them all if you're only betting in $50 increments.
4 - No poker chip tricks: Come on, no poker chip tricksters??
The ugly:
1 - Reading of hands: This is a huge flaw in the game that I have not seen mentioned in too many reviews possibly due to not playing the game for long enough to encounter it. In a heads up hand (meaning just two players left on any given hand) the game reads the cards just fine. If you have 3 or more players involved at the end of the hand and there is only one main pot you will have no problems. However, this reads a little like code...
IF players in hand > 2 AND players that were all in pre-final round > 0,
AND there has been a side pot generated by 2 or more players that are betting more than the previously mentioned all-in player....*breath* you will have issues.
Meaning if player A goes all in on the turn (card 4 out of 5) and player B matches player A's all-in bet AND raises on top of that AND player C calls the raise thus creating a side pot that Player A can not touch the game sometimes screws up the reading of the hands. I have seen flushes fall to two pair in this case. It has happened more than once and can be a huge swing in any tournament. You can go through 50 tournaments never having this situation occur and you can have it occur in a tournament 50 times. So it's a big deal.
2 - Chip stacks: The game completely ignoring the fact that you might have 5x as many chips as the next guy and seemingly randomly generates what your stack looks like every time you look at it. Meaning I might appear to have 1,000 physical chips in front of me this hand, fold before the flop spending nothing, then the next hand only have 15 chips in front of me. Chip stacking is fun to look at and can intimidate others but in this game it makes you go wtf?
Overall
WCP2 shows us a glimpse into the potential greatness of this genre but fails to deliver. The genre and not just WCP2 alone needs more interaction between you and the other players, more voice work, more options at the table, far better announcing, needs commentary, better graphics, and better character creation and POKER CHIP TRICKS AT THE TABLE PLEASE!!!! These are things that a new genre of games should look to improving on but it's almost 2006 these are things that should not be skipped anymore even on first attempts.
WCP2 is worth the $19.99 and I do recommend this buy for any poker fan who wants a decent career mode with decent AI to make the experience worth your time.