Soltrio Solitaire serves up 13 varieties of the solo card game for your Xbox
360. You get the Klondike, FreeCell, and Spider varieties that are well-known to
PC owners and bored office workers everywhere, as well as some relatively
obscure variants such as Archway and Forty Thieves. But solitaire is solitaire,
and you pretty much can guess what you’re getting yourself into with Soltrio;
it’s not much different than the more portable experience you can get with a
deck of cards and a book of solitaire game rules.
With solitaire the basic goal of the game is to avoid losing, but Soltrio
adds some additional motivation through its Voyage mode. In this mode you must
win three games at each “location” (i.e. different background graphic) before
being allowed to move on to the next one. The reward for winning at all the
locations are some Achievement points for your Gamerscore and some graphics to
use in building customized backs for your card deck. Since the solitaire games
are no different whether or not you’re playing in the Voyage mode, I can’t
really think of any reason why you’d want to play individual games of solitaire
outside of this mode. It’s not like the Voyage mode adds any extra challenge as
you can play any variant that you want at any time at each location. You can
even just stick to Memory the whole time since you can’t lose at this
card-matching game. Still I suppose it is good to see that the developers tried
to add a little something extra to the game beyond the solo card games.
The biggest problem is that once you take away Memory and the games and their
variants that already come with your PC, you’re left with only seven other
games. In addition, some of these essentially play themselves, taking all
strategy out of what already is a very chance-dependent game. In fact, most of
the challenge in some of these variants comes in trying to figure out the rules
as the in-game help is not very good at explaining the rules of each game.
Lastly the games play out a lot more slowly than they do on the PC or with a
real deck of cards as a video game controller is not the best device for
dragging cards from one stack to another.
Soltrio tries to add a unique aspect to the solo card game experience with
the inclusion of the oxymoronic multiplayer solitaire. There are two ways to
play online, either working together with another player in co-op mode or
competing against each other head to head. The co-op mode is not particularly
entertaining as solitaire is pretty much just a card-matching game with a large
component of randomness to it and the experience just doesn’t gain anything from
the inclusion of another player looking for card matches. The competitive games
more closely resemble the kids’ card game Speed, with each player trying to burn
through their deck of cards by playing matching cards onto the piles on the
table. These games play out pretty quickly, but are not quite as fast (or nearly
as fun) as playing Speed against your niece or kid brother.
Soltrio Solitaire can only really be recommended to those who really enjoy
the card game and simply have to play it on their Xbox 360. For everyone else
there’s just not enough here that’s different or exciting enough to warrant
buying and downloading the game.
In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated:
62%. Soltrio Solitaire costs more than a deck of
cards and a book of solitaire games without giving you much more for your money.
