I like block puzzle games and I like Yahtzee, poker, and dice, so this sounded like a promising idea for a game. And the basic idea is pretty clever (it reminded me a little bit of the old arcade game "Gun Dealer") -- you have to form poker hands from the grid of dice (pairs, straights, full houses, etc.) to change the background color of all of the tiles on the board.
Unfortunately, in practice, the game lacks a lot of polish, and has enough rough edges that it's pretty disappointing. Some of my specific complaints are as follows:
- The whole presentation is somewhat amateurish. The menus, the screen layouts, the lack of graphical details, it doesn't look TERRIBLE but it's like the bare minimum of effort went into the visual design of the program. And when the first paragraph of the in-game help screen starts with "If you liked Bejeweled and Yahtzee, you'll love Texas Tea", that just looks cheap and tacky.
- The controls, again, aren't TERRIBLE, but they are a little frustrating and confusing. When you swap dice around on the board, there's no animation, the dice just instantly switch places -- this really doesn't offer very good feedback and makes the dice-swapping sort of a chore half the time. The swipe-to-select controls for picking poker hands works pretty well (though as an aside, I'm a little puzzled that you can't make a five of a kind hand, since that's a valid hand in poker dice and Yahtzee).
- The game save is buggy and unreliable. I've played through several levels, left the game, and then when I re-launched it forced me to start over from the beginning. Other times the Continue worked just fine.
- I really don't like the whole heavy-handed "Texas" theme, the way everything is covered in pictures of Texas and Texas flags -- it would have looked a lot better if they had just gone with a more neutral casino-type visual theme.
Overall, hey, for a buck I guess I got a few minutes diversion out of Texas Tea, but it's definitely one of the weaker puzzle games on the iPhone.
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