The battle of the new consoles towards the end of last year inevitably meant that all eyes have been on Sony and Microsoft over recent months. Yet while they were providing the headlines, the Nintendo Switch was quietly smashing all sales records. In fact, despite all the hype surrounding its high-profile competitors, Nintendo’s pint-sized offering has been the best-selling console in the USA throughout 2019 and most of 2020.
With just short of 80 million sales worldwide, the Nintendo Switch is on the cusp of breaking into the top ten in terms of best-selling game consoles of all time – and ousting the PSP in the process.
The Switch’s recognition as a serious console that is about more than just Mario Kart is long overdue, and there is something for everyone on offer. For example, only last year, in a surprising departure from what might be seen as “traditional” Nintendo fare, GameCo released three all-new casino games for the Switch. It’s a genre most commonly associated with mobile or online gaming, yet the titles have proved to be steady sellers. Here, we take a look at these, along with four other titles, to pull together our Lucky Seven top casino games for the Nintendo Switch.
Vegas Party
The first-ever casino-style game for the Switch has been around for 12 years now, yet for many, it is still the go-to title in the genre. In case you’ve yet to try it, the game takes the form of a race from one end of Sin City’s famous Strip to the other. There are both opportunities and threats aplenty along the way, along with 10 fantastic mini-games built on casino classics. These are worth the price of admission in themselves and include roulette, baccarat, Texas Holdem and others.
Video Poker at Aces Casino
Here’s the first of our new game entries from GameCo, and it was the first to be released, in April 2020. Video poker is actually a great place to start, and it’s the most accessible form of the game for new beginners. If you’ve played before, you will know what to expect. It’s a classic 5-card draw, and there are all the usual variations like Jacks or Better, Deuces Wild and so on. What we really like about this one, however, is the choice of themes available. There’s only so much you can do to make a video poker game stand out, so providing an option to play while surrounded by 3-D sharks, for example, is a nice touch.
Lots of Slots
Do you prefer slots to table games? Lots of Slots by build quality can easily compete with state-of-the-art slot games that can be found at the world’s best online casinos. On entering the casino, you are given 25,000 betting chips and there are 15 different slot games to which you can feed them in your bid to join Millionaires Row. Initially, just two games are available for open play, but successful spins will help you to level up and unlock more games. The game delivers on its promise of a Vegas-style slot gaming experience and is a lot of fun.
Four Kings
Four Kings casino offers a social gaming multiplayer casino experience in 3D – that’s quite a prospect even by today’s standards, so you can understand why it attracted lots of attention when it was released by Digital Leisure back in 2015. It’s not your standard setting for an MMO game, but it works. There’s something of a SIMS-feel to the game, which is no bad thing, and as well as all the usual casino games, there’s a hotel and nightclub where you can fine-tune your character. Of course, there are microtransactions, but you can actually proceed at a good rate by making shrewd use of the 10,000 chips you are given on arrival. Initially, you are restricted to the low-bets tables, but as you level up, you can join the high rollers if you wish. Four Kings stands the test of time as a great choice for RPG enthusiasts who want to try something out of the ordinary.
Roulette at Aces Casino
Here’s our second visit to Aces, and this time our destination is the roulette wheel. There is a choice of European or American roulette, and also the special Ghost Table for some extra fun. Like the video slots game, the roulette sim itself does all you can ask of it, and the ghost table is a nice touch. These days, online casinos offer extra choices like multiple wheels, lightning bonuses and so on – the developers have, perhaps missed a trick by omitting these. Nevertheless, there’s nothing quite like roulette, it’s a game that anyone can win, and Aces Casino is a great place for Switch players to try their luck.
Poker Club
Released at the end of last year to coincide with the arrival of the PS5 and Xbox Series X, Poker Club claims to be the most immersive poker sim ever. That’s quite an assertion, and the glitches that dogged the game over the initial weeks after launch did not help. However, any good poker player needs to have patience, and those who exercised it and gave the developers time to rush out the necessary patches have been rewarded with a game that offers an extensive choice of multiplayer tournaments, as well as some excellent single-player versions of the world’s most popular card game. The “best ever” claim might be hyperbole, but Poker Club is definitely worth adding to your game collection.
Slots of Poker at Aces Casino
Our final visit to Aces, and this game might sound like one with an identity crisis. What we actually have here is a collection of six different slot games, but all are poker-based in that they payout on the basis of video poker hands, so rewards are available for anything from a pair of jacks, while a royal flush represents the jackpot. A little like Lots of Slots, you steadily unlock bigger and better machines by leveling up. This is probably the most engaging of all the releases in the new Aces Casino series, and if you are only going to buy one, it’s the game we would recommend.
This is a paid guest post.