Road to Vegas

If Road to Vegas gets one thing absolutely spot on the money, it's a perfect imitation of the legendary gambling town Las Vegas. On the front of the box, it appears to be a glamourous world full of happiness, hotels and novelty-sized gambling equipment. But the second you step beyond the state boundary, that DS cart is full of crushed dreams, ruined lives, and standing alone on the freeway hitchhiking in your underwear. Welcome to Vegas. Don't stay too long.

The idea, ignoring the flimsy storyline, is that Road to Vegas is a light-hearted collection of mini-games that range from proper casino fare such as Poker and Baccarat through to old arcade enemies of the wallet like one-armed bandits and tiny plastic horse racing. Naturally, for any game involving gambling, they've tied it in with the world's most famous gambling venue, Las Vegas, and so you have a menu screen that's captained by a lady in a skimpy dress, and all of the money is in dollars. This seems fair enough at first, until you start the game and discover yourself in, of all places, Blackpool.

Yes, the game manages to crowbar in a story mode into what is essentially just a big ol' collection of mini-games. So you travel to Blackpool with five hundred dollars under your belt to start off your life of high-stakes gambling, fast cars and loose women. This isn't Wink Bingo, it's Blackpool, so the chances are you'll end up in a glorified Bingo hall full of drunks and some guy in a top hat and a cape.

There are three locations in total in the story mode, with Monaco and Las Vegas lying in wait for players who persevere through the money-making process to win tickets to fly out there, but they all amount to the same thing – a scrolling diorama of a room with lots of different games of chance or skill to be played for cash. Win enough cash, and progress through. Lose enough, and you're given another five hundred and put on your way.

It's simple enough, and these mini-games are varied sufficiently so you'll probably find one that you like the idea of. They all have three levels – Easy, Medium, Hard – which you select from before playing, and most have a cost to play. However, the difficulty levels usually only affect the chance of winning, rather than the difficulty, which makes many of the games even more frustrating than they already are.

And they are frustrating. Even in the starting venue, many of the games are hugely unbalanced in terms of risk versus reward. The Wheel of Fortune requires a $100 entry fee – that's a fifth of your starting wallet – and it's fantastically difficult to make money on. Other games, meanwhile, are slow-paced and offer very minimal gameplay. Bingo is a painstaking process of watching a slowly-changing number and ticking off a card on the touchscreen, and while it might be broadly the same as that in real life, that doesn't mean it's automatically a good idea to put into a game about the glamour of Vegas.

Even worse, there are some clear and obvious loopholes to the game's money-raising mechanic (see PG Tips for a quick walkthrough). Which means it's all quite easy to exploit the story mode and dance your way to Vegas, but only by defeating the entire point of the game.

Other parts of the game fare far better. The mini-games themselves are solidly designed, even with plinky-plonky music ticking away behind them, and a lot of them can be controlled quite satisfyingly via the touchscreen. The slot machines, for instance, can be activated with a quick swipe of the thumb down the screen, and most of the mini-game interfaces are designed with this sort of simple control in mind.

Road to Vegas also includes single-cart multiplayer, meaning that up to eight people can play together with just a single copy of the game. The multiplayer section doesn't offer every game as playable, but there's a couple of Poker variations – Five Card, and Texas - in there, and that alone makes it a good distraction.

But these can't solve the larger problem; that many of the games on offer should be fun but end up being impossible to play, either through difficulty or boredom. What happens in Vegas, so they say, stays in Vegas. If only this game had, too.