Poker Pretty Girls Battle: Texas Hold’em review for PS5/4, Switch, PC

Poker Pretty Girls Battle: Texas Hold’em is pretty straightforward as to what you should expect just based on the name. There are only two game modes offered to you from the main menu, and there doesn’t appear to be much difference between the two. You can either play “Pretty Mode” or “Free Play”. As far as I’m able to tell, there are not any particular differences between the two modes. In Pretty Mode, you seemingly play against one girl of your choice and two random male opponents while Free Play puts you up against three girls of your choice.

In terms of gameplay, Poker Pretty Girls Battle is a pretty simple poker interface. You get three controls- Call, Fold, or Raise/Bet. Everything else is handled automatically as the game runs, as would be expected. The unfortunate thing that I began to notice in my game time was that the AI was very telling in what they had. They will only raise if they currently have something in their hand that is a possible win. On top of that, the AI will almost always accept a raise regardless of what is in their hand. How this ended up playing out in action was that you could easily rig the game by getting a good hand and going all-in. As mentioned before, they seldom decline a raise, so if you go all-in, they will follow 90% of the time. With this strategy, you can end almost every match within 3 hands, and if not, a failure just resets the board immediately and puts everyone back at 100 chips.

On several occasions, I would lose a payout to an opponent incorrectly. In one instance, Poker Girls ended up giving the entire pot to my opponent when I had two pairs (Jacks and 10s) while they only had a pair of Queens. This seemingly happened fairly often in my time spent with the game, occurring at least once per match in some fashion. Between the failing to pay the correct player and the bots’ complete lack of AI, the matches often felt pretty bland. Bundle that all together with the fact that the game only has one audio track in-game that restarts at the beginning of every turn, and the game is honestly kind of hard to play for long.

Poker Pretty Girls Battle is only $5 on every platform, so it’s not asking much. It’s hard to recommend it even just for the poker aspect when the algorithm doesn’t always pay out correctly. If the game catches your eye, give it a shot and maybe you’ll find something to like. As it stands, however, it is pretty shallow and the core mechanics have visible flaws, making playing pretty rough.

Note: eastasiasoft provided us with a Poker Pretty Girls Battle: Texas Hold’em PS5 code for review purposes.