Good evening ladies and germs. Welcome to the Pocket Gamer review of Burning Monkey Casino! I'd hoped to have got this review written a lot sooner, but I've been reading a book about the history of glue and I couldn't put it down.
Thank you, thank you. You're a wonderful audience.
Okay, I'd hoped by this point in my pocket gaming career that I wasn't so easily seduced by average games camouflaged by style, but Burning Monkey Casino has proven that's not the case. This is a supremely average game made utterly wonderful by a magically alluring design, and before I go any further, I recommend you get on the App Store and set it off downloading.
Beneath the magnificent surface it's basically just a collection of casino games, but the attention to detail that Freeverse has saturated Burning Monkey Casino with elevates it to the top of its genre. Here is a game that completely captures the essence of a tacky Vegas casino: crooning lounge acts, badum-tish sound effects after the jokes, and a wealth of opportunities to lose money.
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There are seven different games in total, all of which are about as basic as any you've seen before: blackjack, poker, money wheel, pachinko, lottery scratch cards, slot machines and three card Monty. In some cases, these are reduced to ultra-quick versions of their typical selves.
Play is simple: throw down an initial stake and test your luck. Setting out with $500, you usually can plunk down a wager starting at a quarter up to a cocky $100. Some of the games, such as blackjack and poker, can offer some pretty big wins and losses, though lottery scratch cards and pachinko are pretty inexpensive and unlikely to yield much return. This doesn't mean they don't offer a few moments of gambling fun, of course, and each game has received Freeverse's careful attention in its design.
And that's the real beauty of Burning Monkey Casino. Despite the rather art nouveau graphics, there's a real sense of hopping around a real casino. You may throw $10 on a blackjack table, then rush off to play the slot machines or spinning the wheel of fortune as you dash past. Your pot peaks and dips like a rollercoaster, but the money never feels like the driving force behind your betting spree - that comes from the sheer delight of indulging your playful gambling habit.
Accentuating Burning Monkey Casino's unique style is the lounge act. It's a hilarious break from betting with wisecracks and cheesy one-liners warming up the stage for the crooning lounge singer. There's even a waitress that delivers a banana daiquiri to the blackjack table. It's precisely these jovial and inspired distractions that make Burning Monkey Casino such a success of style over substance, only without the negative connotations that phrase usually brings.
Coupled with the huge amount of statistics the game gathers and the option to borrow money from the casino (complete with ominous warning about the management knowing where you live), Burning Monkey Casino is likely to be the best £0.59/$.099 you could spend at the App Store for the remainder of the year.
