Uno Rush Review - Xbox 360

7.5

Gameplay: 8
Graphics: 5
Audio: 4
Multiplayer: 7
Innovation: 5

Introduction

Uno. It’s a classic 'summer beach house, warm afternoon, rosy childhood memory'-style card game. Before kids were all ‘poker this’ and ‘Cranium that’, they played Uno. It was just numbers, colours, a deck and a discard pile – simple, addictive, and great fun. Now, after the successful translation of the game to Xbox LIVE, there’s a new version on the Marketplace that bumps up the pace, and bring the visuals to the NXE standard.

Gameplay

You all know how to play Uno, right? You get a hand of seven cards of different numbers and colours, and take it in turns to match the number of colour of the top card of the discard pile with one of your own. Then there are the action cards – Skip, Reverse, Draw Two, Wild, and Wild Draw Four. Call ‘Uno’ when you have one card left, and then when one person plays all their hand out, the value of everyone else’s remaining cards are added up and awarded to the winner as points (though you never did this when playing in real life).

So what does Uno Rush bring to the table? The name of the game is speed. If it’s your turn, you’d better have a card ready, because you have literally two or three seconds to play it. It’s automatic. The game is set up with four players; cards face up in each corner of the screen. You rifle through your hand with the control stick and use the A button to pick up and drop cards as desired. If the centre stack is red, you’ll need to drag a red card to the front in advance, or within the two-second leeway.

Here’s where they mix it up. If you can line up more than one red card, then you can deal out a chain, and get rid of more than one card per turn. And then, if you can match the number of the last red card in your hand to a number of a different colour, you can continue the chain. It’s such a simple addition, but it completely changes the gameplay. You need to watch what the other players are doing – they might have a red card at the front of their deck, but halfway through it might become connect to a yellow. That means you have to prepare your yellow cards to play.

Uno Rush gets seriously addictive. You’re always itching to play one more round before you have to go to bed. You get into the zone of organising your cards, preparing for chains, and watching your opponents. With two or more local players, it’s even better. I came to appreciate playing with more than just seven cards in the hand (you can tweak all the settings to your liking), because with ten or even fifteen cards, the game opens for some amazing combo mayhem. You’ll see some truly amazing plays online, with people getting rid of ten or twenty cards in one hit and coming back to win the ...