Games / Game Reviews

Review: Poker Night at the Inventory 2

By Sean Booker
April 29, 2013 - 10:32

Telltale Games follows up its themed poker game with a more bombastic and ridiculous cast in Poker Night at the Inventory 2. These new characters add a good mix of flavor to play with but can get tiring after the jokes begin to repeat. This is true of the guest host too: GLaDOS, whose dialogue can become annoying quite quickly. Even so, there are some great new additions to the game and the improved visuals are easily welcomed. There’s a lot of good humor to Poker Night 2 but the game can get boring overall after only an hour or two.

There are two main aspects to Poker Night 2, the card game and the dialogue you listen to while playing. If you don’t like poker this game is not for you; for those of you even a little interested will easily be entertained by the good cast of humorous characters. In addition to the inclusion of Omaha Hold ‘Em (as opposed to only Texas Hold ‘Em in the first game) Telltale has switched out the other players and thrown in Brock Samson from the Venture Bros., Claptrap from Borderlands, Ash for Evil Dead and Sam from the Sam and Max series. It’s nice to see a new dynamic from these characters and the developers have written some smart and funny jokes for them to bring up during the hands.

However, it’s the writing itself that ends up being Poker Night 2’s biggest downfall. In order to spice up the game of poker, Telltale Game has put in a ton of opportunities for your opponents to start chatting and reacting. Any time you make a move, they say something, any time someone else makes a significant move - they say something. This starts off as fine and the jokes they say are great but it can get old pretty quickly. It only took me about an hour before I started hearing repeated dialogue and seriously dreading some of those characters opening their mouths. Personally, this annoyance came most of the time when Claptrap or GLaDOS chirped up with something condescending. There is really only so much autotuned robot voices I can listen to before I want to kill myself.

As before your goal in the game is to simply play poker and enjoy the atmosphere they have set up. It’s a fairly shallow concept and that goes nicely with the low price of $5 that they’re asking for. A good addition is the new challenges you can try and work towards while playing through your hands. These can include moves as simple as “Going All In” or to as complex as “Win a Showdown with only a Kicker” and allow you to focus on more interesting objectives. Completing objectives will allow you to win special items from your opponents and rewards for outside the game depending on what platform you’re playing on (for example: avatar awards on the Xbox). It’s also worth noting that the Xbox 360 version (the one I was reviewing on) had some series hitching and minor audio problems pretty regularly.

Winning games and completing challenges will unlock you chips that you can spend on new card decks, themes and backgrounds. These themed unlocks will also play into how certain characters dress, act and the jokes being made. Along with this, you can now buy your opponents drinks in order to make them play worse and reveal their ‘tells’ more openly. It’s a nice addition but I never really found myself invested enough to spend my hard earned chips on anything outside of the customization unlocks.

Poker Night at the Inventory 2 improves on the formula set up in the first game in a number of ways but still manages to get old pretty quickly. The fun cast of characters can deliver some great, well written humor but you will notice repeats after only an hour. And at the rate they talk, you need to really like their voices since you will hear a ton of it. However, it was nice to see the different game modes and the in-game challenges to work on in order to spice up this traditional card game. I started off really enjoying the game but the numerous hitching and repeated dialogue really made me glad that they’re not charging much for this. There are some great moments in here but they’re front loaded and then far between.

Rating: 6 /10

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12