Gambling, a Review
I recently had to opportunity to try Gambling on a trip to Vegas. How was the "Fun Factor"?
Gambling is a long running live service game that's recently seen a slate of updates in the form of smartphone app integration and alternate reality mechanics. But how do its bones hold up in 2026?
To find out, my esteemed editors at Critical Theorycraft put me up at a hotel and casino in Las Vegas, Nevada—known far and wide to gamers as the home of the world famous HyperX Esports Arena—for the purposes of reviewing Gambling with our brand new, totally objective and unbiased scoring system.
The Overworld
My hotel was divided into several social hubs, including a lobby, restaurant, and pool. From the LAS Airport you can zone into the area with up to three friends using a convenient taxi service. A steady procession of cheesy in-universe advertisements provides some amusement while you wait.
Once you're in the hotel, the interface and menu screens present some challenges. You're supposed to interact with a small tablet to the side of the big, obvious kiosks if you've already checked in. Across the board, some more overt tutorialization would have been helpful.
Your hotel room makes for a convenient, private stash space—good for offloading items and cash, as well as for changing your appearance and equipment. We found that our in-room blow dryer had shorted, which made for an exciting high-stakes challenge as hairs started air-drying in all sorts of unwanted directions before a hotfix arrived.
There's no map to speak of, which means that, in the tradition of games like Dark Souls, you'll have to rely on your own wits if you hope to have any idea where you're going. Given the co-operative nature of play here, though, it also means you'll be in constant communication with friends over voice or text chat to find each other and coordinate your objectives and waypoints.
Of course, the main attraction is the casino floor. Thousands of players orbit hundreds of slot machines like planetoids around miniature suns. Others coagulate around tables dealt by practiced hands attached to faces as friendly or as indifferent as you care to sit in front of. Here, you can play a variety of mini-games, which, Wario Ware-style, really comprise the bulk of the experience.
What I wanted to play was baccarat, because of James Bond, but I couldn't find a table across three different casinos with a minimum bet under $300. Some would call this a "skill issue."
Below are my thoughts on the games I did get to play!
Blackjack
Fans of Red Dead Redemption and its sequel will be right at home with this push-your-luck 1v1 card battler. You want your hand to beat the dealer's, and while you're surrounded by other players, their role is mainly atmospheric. You can freely chat with them or observe their own interactions with the dealer.
Graphics 8/10
One of the best parts of the game is taking stock of your fellow players. At one of this reviewer's tables, a tipsy older gentleman was already on a first-name basis with a charismatic dealer; their animated repartee was rewarding to observe. A small quibble that could easily be ironed out in a future update is that the cards are sometimes dealt upside down, leading the casual player (failing to notice the orientation of the suit symbol) to mistake a 6 for a 9, or vice versa. Otherwise, it's got a clean interface.
Sound 5/10
Depending on your dealer, explanations of the game's goals and strategies can range from non-existent to Ocarina of Time's Navi levels of intrusive. While this can sometimes be useful—the dealer wants you to win, after all, so that you'll have money left over to tip them!—the constant commentary can start to feel a little like you're being scolded.
Controls 4/10
Remember what I said about lecturing? Well, if you're new to the game, one note you'll get a lot from the dealers is to please be clearer with your hand signals. That's right: it's 2008 again and this game's got motion controls! You can do a wave your hand to "stay" your current cards, or tap the table to ask for a new card to "hit." But if your wave looks a little more like a karate chop, you'll learn that the overhead cameras (can developers give it a rest with the "always online" requirements??) might have trouble seeing your intent, getting you and/or the dealer into trouble. There's a learning curve for sure.
Fun Factor 10/10
The title has an addictive gameplay loop, and the visceral thrill of hitting a natural blackjack—that's summing your cards up to 21, for the novitiates—is matched only by the compulsion to go for one more round on a loss.
Challenge 9/10
There's a lot of replay value here, and there's a high skill ceiling to boot—if, that is, you start playing the game by counting the cards in the deck. Of course, as Kevin Spacey teaches us, that's a social deception game in its own right.
Score 7.2/10
Roulette
Ah, the wheel of fate. Fortune meets folly. Sometimes you're on top, and sometimes you're trampled. Except here the wheel is horizontal, and I guess you're kind of inside the wheel? I placed a third of my initial $15 bet on 5, a red number, and damn if it didn't come up on the first spin. "Hot dog," I thought! But my dog was never quite as hot again.
Graphics 10/10
Undoubtedly the most visually stimulating table game, and yet it's also far more elegant than the surrounding slots. A not insignificant number of casino patrons seemed to prefer video roulette, which seemed to me to be a sign of moral and spiritual decay. If we can't take pleasure in big spinning things what can we take pleasure in?
Sound 10/10
Unfortunately, not one of my roulette dealers yelled "round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows!" But I may have been thinking of a carnival instead of a casino. That said, there's an undeniable ASMR appeal to the clickity-clackity wheel spin.
Controls 3/10
Gosh, could you imagine if you got to spin the wheel yourself? I understand there would be many problems with that, but maybe in an expansion or a sequel they could figure out some way to let you try it. As it stands, it's sort of fun to pick your wife's birthday on the inside bets, but sometimes you're also stuck twiddling your chips while some sweaty try-hard is building out a programmatic probability matrix on the felt.
Fun Factor 10/10
The charismatic dealer at my table asked me where I was from and continued to smile and shout "Heyyy, Chicago!" at me as I passed his other tables throughout my weekend. This is neck and neck with winning money as being the best part of playing roulette because now I can say, "In Vegas they call me 'Chicago.'"
Challenge 3/10
Can you name a number between 1 and 36? Congratulations, you're a master of roulette! The only trick to playing this game is to lose your money as slowly as possible. Or learn to enjoy watching your friends lose their money.
Score 7.2/10
Slots
Taking a break from the table games, I tried my hand at the Kong: Skull Island branded slot machine. I picked this slot machine because it had King Kong on it, but I also could have picked any one of seemingly several thousand machines with buffalo theming, if I wanted a different large animal. I spent $10 and somehow made $55.
Graphics 10/10
In my playthrough, King Kong went "primal mode," and started smashing the numbers on the screen. When Kong started smashing the numbers, I started winning money for some reason. My eyes were practically glued to "primal mode," as were those of my friends who had gathered around to watch me like I was about to reach a high score.
Sound 6/10
I'm not sure what sounds were coming from King Kong and what sounds were coming from the thousands of buffalo around me. It was a cacophony of growling and grumbling and smashing/stamping. That said, when you're the center of a group whooping it up, as it were, at a slot machine, you feel like you're on top of the world. Of course, if you're a loser your mileage may vary.
Controls 2/10
Sliding a bill into the slot on the machine was the last time I had any clue what I was doing or how it affected me. While there was a button to explain the rules, social pressure prevented me from pressing it. Instead, I pressed every other button, physical and virtual. For all I know, there may not have even been a touch screen, but I pressed it anyways. At some point, I activated or unlocked or won "primal mode."
Fun Factor 10/10
Kong: Skull Island: The Slot Machine is a must for fans of the genre. I thoroughly enjoyed winning $55. Minus my $10 bet, that's $45! Or, more than 4% of the way to buying a base model Steam Machine!
Challenge 8/10
I'll say it. Slot machines are puzzle games. And while I'm at it, so are pinball machines. They're puzzle games because they're games I don't understand when I'm playing them, and then they stop me from playing them for reasons still unknown. A true thinking man's gambling game.
Score 7.2/10
Craps
By the time I got to try craps, I had nearly run out of my self-allotted gambling money.
"Crap," I said.
"Righto," said my friends, ushering me to a big, intimidating table clotted with gamblers.
Sure enough, I had chips left over for one bet. In this game, you bet on numbers showing up on dice thrown by another player around the table.
"What's the number you don't want to get?" I asked my good buddy.
"Don't worry about it," he said as our other friend was throwing the dice.
"Ah, right," I said, remembering, "seven!"
At that very moment the dice settled on seven and lost us all our bets. And I learned a very important lesson about superstition.
Graphics 10/10
The soul-rending glares of my fellow players, mostly strangers, were exceptionally legible and intuitive. They profoundly unsettled me, and I was distracted from the fact that the table itself is an over-designed mess.
Sound 5/10
The novelty of voice commands wins some points, but their complete lack of explanation offsets my enthusiasm.
Controls 8/10
Only playing one bet, I didn't have a chance to try out the dice throwing gameplay, but it looked fun from a distance.
Fun Factor 3/10
I did not have very much fun playing this game.
Challenge 10/10
Like an old-school platformer, this game is frustrating, but seemingly fair.
Score 7.2/10
Final Thoughts
As Danny Ocean tells us, if you never change the stakes, never bet big on your one shot, the house always wins.
But Danny forgot to add: the house always wins first as tragedy, then as farce. Then again and again and again as compounding farces.
Perhaps instead follow the advice of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, "Learn to enjoy losing." They say something similar about Dwarf Fortress!
In my case, the house won, but so it does in any arcade. My stack of quarters next to nil, I retreated, along with my companions, to Vegas' other activities, each of which lay behind another paywall. Confounded microtransactions!
I doubt many players will ever see the endgame that Gambling has to offer. Across several days of playtime, I certainly didn't feel like I'd scratched the surface. Although I did feel that I'd gotten my fill.
I'd wager that the dedicated player will likely find plenty here to occupy them, even as the surprises start to feel more and more familiar. As for the rest of us, well, there's always the buffets.
POF
