Review: The Four Kings Casino and Slots

Developer Digital Leisure made a free-to-play real-life simulated casino game mixed with something that reminds me of Playstation Home. While you can’t win money with Four Kings Casino and Slots you do get frequent in-game rewards depending on how well you play. This gambling experience is something that definitely fills a few voids on Xbox. To begin you don’t have many similar games like this and people haven’t been able to go to casinos that much lately because of the known COVID-19 annoyances.

Available games in The Four Kings: Casino and Slots: Baccarat, Big 6 Wheel, Bingo, Blackjack, Bowling, Craps, Keno, Poker, Roulette, Video Blackjack, Video Poker, War, and around five different slots games.

We won and lost in The Four Kings: Casino and Slots for around seven hours on Xbox Series X

What we liked!

• Free-to-Play but… This game is completely free-to-play and the game even offers multiple ways to earn free chips. You get the free stuff when logging in on a daily basis, you get 250 chips every 15 min at the chip terminal, you have a Daily Super Slot, daily tasks, weekly tasks, and a few free bingo games each day. You would think that with all that you have more than enough chips but that isn’t really the case if you are unlucky in gambling games. I was fortunate enough to receive enough chips from the developer to review this game but before that, I quickly ran out of chips to play what I wanted to play. Considering this game is free I was surprised to see that buying additional chips isn’t that expensive 50.000 chips will cost you €5, 150.000 chips €10, and 400.000 €20.
• Tasks: Daily and weekly tasks give you the motivation to play games that you normally wouldn’t. Getting bonus chips as a reward to play something out of your zone is not only fun but expands your knowledge for when you ever decide to play it for real-life money. Some of the tasks might feel a bit grindy though, as I got ‘run for 500 meters’ for two consecutive days. Still, it is a very nice way to get a lot more gameplay fun out of this free-to-play game. For the past five days, it has been a routine to play an hour in Four Kings completing all the daily tasks.
• A social experience: Most players won’t be making friends in-game but playing a few bowling matches, poker, or Blackjack against your Call of Duty or Gears of War buddies is a nice pace of change, one that doesn’t cost anything either. With a club zone (with dance music), virtual purchasable avatar property that allows for inviting your friends, and quick keyboard chat it fits perfectly in the social gaming platform genre. I am not the kind of gamer that enjoys Second Life or Habbo but I’m aware that many other people love these kinds of experiences. Four Kings isn’t only about playing all the gambling games it is about bringing people together too in a safe virtual way without the risk of catching that nasty COVID-19 bug.
• Audio: I haven’t been to a real casino but going from experience from watching movies and series I would say that Four Kings does an excellent job with the ambient audio. The sound immersion is great when you walk around or sit down while playing a slots game. Shuffle sounds from cards in poker sounds realistic and the Bingo voice calling out numbers is clear. It is clear that Digital Leisure invested a lot of time in making the audio believable.

Somewhere between

• Customization options: Standing out in the crowd is easy with enough RP points, these points are used to purchase very expensive clothing or for example a giant ant or a more normal dog or cat. You earn RP points by playing enough (read extremely much) to level up your game tiers. I was a bit disappointed that the basic editor tool isn’t that expansive. You can make a pretty original avatar but nothing like other similar social gaming platform genre games. changing your appearance and clothes is filled with visual clipping errors too.

What we disliked

• Visuals: I mentioned Playstation Home earlier as it has some similar social tools and experiences. It is a bit of a disappointment when a PS3 ‘game’ or whatever the heck Playstation Home was looks better than something on Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S. While the digital casino has some decent setpieces and lighting it doesn’t come over as something impressive or even up to today’s standards. Jaggies on almost every object, blurred environments and avatars look lifeless. Especially people of color look far from realistic, their eyes pop out in a silly way and the color scheme is completely off. This feels a bit better when you are actually playing one of the games but a bit better polish would have been extremely welcome.

CONCLUSION

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