It seems like I'm nothing more than a wannabe gambler, wishing I could be one of the big shots at the table of some tournament, slow playing my way to a big money win. Sadly I've only found myself going into debt on free online poker sites and then doing well enough at an actual casino to win some money, only to then blow it and even have to borrow some chips from a friend to cover my bet. So I'm not exactly the greatest gambler when it comes to the tables, but what would happen if you put a snowmobile between my legs and had me making my own hands? As it turns out I'd do pretty well, but the real question is does the game come out bluffing with nothing or is there a solid hand there to bet behind?

Arctic Stud: Poker Run (ASPR from here on) doesn't exactly feature a story, instead relying on the natural progression of you through the ranks of the gambling elite to be the storyline. You start out by picking a character picture, though the picture can easily be changed at anytime just so you can mix things up and be a lumberjack one moment and a goblin looking monstrosity the next. Once you've picked your character you then name your profile and suddenly you're reading to start your poker run career.

Going into the game, little did I know that the mechanics of a poker run actually come from a real life game, so for those who aren't in the know, here is the basics. The core gameplay idea is still to get the best hand of poker you can possibly get, striving to find that perfect hand so you can raise the bet if you want and ultimately – with enough hands – win the tournament. In standard poker you're randomly dealt a set of cards, and depending on the rules, you'll either be bluffing and gambling with what you have in your hand currently, or asking for some new cards. In ASPR, however, the mechanics regarding how you create your hand is unlike any poker I've ever played before.

You start each tournament round as a rider waiting to jump on their snowmobile, and you want to get out and explore the course as best as you can, looking for one of the 30 randomly scattered cards that are placed around the environment. One card grab isn't going to help anything, so you need to find five cards, and once you grab five cards you then need to rush to the finish line, locking in your hand. After the first contestant has made their way across the finish line and locked their hand in, it is then up to the other players involved to get there within 90 seconds to lock their hand in too. Of course grabbing five random cards and deciding that's your hand is silly, as you could literally gather five cards where you'll end up with nothing but a high card and no pairs, straight, or full house to improve your odds of winning. Instead, after you get five cards, you'll generally then keep cruising around the level as you have time, running over every card you see, hoping that it will help better your hand.

A nice thing about the ASPR system is that you don't "really" need to know all the possible poker hands and know what beats what to win, as the game will automatically give you your best hand, replacing a low card with something like an ace or king, or even replacing cards so suddenly you have a pair where you didn't have one before. The system is automatic and it is impossible to manually tweak your own hand, which is sad since the artificial intelligence isn't perfect, as I had a chance one time to have four of a kind, but the game was unable to read what I was thinking, and so it didn't know four of a kind was possible when it didn't believe I could do anything with a two card. The game won't generally screw you over too badly, but this is an annoyance that will displease the real poker fans out there who know what they are doing.

As you're driving around these environments on your snowmobiles trying to make poker hands, there will also be opponents doing the same. The game, depending on the tourney, will often show you what cards each player has, and so it would generally be depressing to see that some other player has the ace you need to make a straight, but hey, what are you going to do about it? Well, as it turns out, you can do battle with them, hopefully blowing them up temporarily and making them drop all their cards, and then driving over them quickly to get the ones you need. You can use machine guns, dynamite, and heat-seeking missiles all to help bring down your enemies; if you're on foot you can even use snowballs to help combat your foes. The game also has some defensive powerups, such as a Predator like cloaking system and armor boosting powers. The driving and combat is very basic and easy to get into, having the forward, reverse, left and right turns attached to the standard WASD keys, and you'll shoot your weapons with your left mouse button, activate your speed boosts with the right mouse button, and you'll scroll through your various weapons with your mouse wheel.

A big part of poker is the betting and bluffing process, and while there is some of that here in ASPR, it won't have that same feel or dynamic as it does in other poker games; basically each round costs so much to enter, you can bump it once before finishing with your hand, bump after finishing to raise it a little more, or bump a second time after finishing to go all-in. Not being able to subtly bluff and bid not only hurts the game of poker itself, but makes ASPR itself a tiring affair sometimes, as tournaments with a winner take all rule set can go on for near an hour or more, because it's just not easy to make your opponents get rid of their money. Another problem with the tournament system is that the entire tournament takes place on the exact same level, with only the positioning of the cards changing up, so you can only imagine playing for an hour on the exact same level seeing the exact same sights. You only start out with one tournament level to begin with, but as you advance you'll unlock not only many more characters (37) but also 126 levels spanning 81 square miles in nine different environments. You won't just be fighting enemy AI (of which there are several different difficulty settings for your choosing) as you'll also be able to go online and play against other players.

Graphically the game is pretty poor, featuring fairly generic character designs that are very cartoony and plenty of jaggies, and the environments are just as big of a letdown. The environments are usually too sparse, there are times when trees are nothing more than flat images you can run right through, and basically you just won't like spending hours upon hours in some of these levels. In terms of audio the game features very little music, the sound of snowmobile engines dominate and differ very little if none at all from beginning to end, and the sound bytes of your competitors repeat too often and compression wise don't sound good and are sometimes hard to even understand.

As a budget title Arctic Stud: Poker Run isn't bad, but when you're comparing it to gaming in general, there is a lot more you could want from this game. The game has an interesting gameplay idea with you rushing around trying to make poker hands, but the AI doesn't put up too much of a challenge, the game doesn't properly know at all times what the best possible hand you could have really is, and the game just doesn't look good technically.

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