*Our guest reviewer Elfa looks at Uno HD on Android*
I love card games… and solitaire…. and patience… and basically anything that involves a bit of thinking a bit of luck and doesn’t require very quick reactions. So when I was given Uno I was excited. At that price and in HD quality it looked like I was going to have great time playing. I must admit I did not know the rules of the game but that is probably true for most players. I mean how many people know how to play Uno?
So when I started the game I was a bit annoyed with all the logo flashing and advert at the beginning but I thought that that was a one off and they were just trying to imitate the PC games. But it was not a one off and it was 20 seconds (believe me, when you wait, that is a lot!) and there’s no way to skip it! I was annoyed already. For a game that costs almost £2 (way above the average for a card game) that is too many splash screens! The game itself must be their advert – if people like it they will find out the name of the company to buy more games from them rather than being bombarded with the company logo before they even start a (every) game. The logos themselves were nicely done, and I wished they have used the skills they used to create the logos when they were making the rest of the game. I was not impressed by the graphics of the game. For a game that boasts for HD quality I found it very underwhelming.
Once you go to start a game you had to create a profile (good!) so more than one person can play the game without messing up each other’s stats. Creating an additional profile is hidden in the settings menu options (typing the name of the player is in CAPS by default!). Then you can choose a colour and an icon (I didn’t get the point of that, why would I need an icon?).
So now you’re finally ready to play, or so you think! Clicking to start a new game simply gives you the scoring of the cards! I don’t have a clue what these cards look like, what they are (they are not the standard pack of cards) and I don’t even know if it is good to have a lot of points or bad! Rules first please! It then tells you that you need a score of 250 to win! I thought, “Great! I will just need to collect these high value cards I just heard about and when I get 250 points I am winning. (Ha! I was wrong. Apparently to win a game you must get rid of all your cards, not collect them! I found this out a lot later…)
The game then shows you how to control your cards. All great but I still don’t know the rules! After you are shown the controls you are taken to the game directly. Heeeelp! I still don’t know the rules! I decided to stop the game and find out how to play. “The rules must be somewhere in the app”, I thought to myself. And I will find them in the…… Help I presume? Yes, all 22 screens of them, explaining the controls AND the rules AND the cards themselves. But I still didn’t get it. How am I scoring points when I am getting rid of cards? It never got any clearer.
It is a nice game to play once you get the rules and forget about the fact that you don’t really know how the scoring is done (logic and experience suggests that it is the cards that you discard that are scored… maybe…?).
The multiplayer mode is a great bonus, but local only. I never found anybody else willing to spend £2 for the game when you could buy 4 packs of real cards for the same money. I easilly found another Uno game on the market that was much cheaper (plus it had a free lite version) and not much worse. I also downloaded a free game from the market with more than 250 different solitaire type games that I actually enjoyed more because of the variety.
So choose for yourselves – good game idea, local multiplayer mode but not very user friendly, not HD and definitely overpriced.
6 logo screens too many out of 10