The Verdict

Pocket Card Jockey is, for all intents and purposes, a pretty good game. What it really came down to for a final verdict was the price. It was fun, but 3DS is pretty well known for their high price tagged games.

Pocket Card Jockey surprisingly doesn’t fall into that pitfall with it’s price of $6.99.

I’ve reviewed worse games on the platform for a much higher price. Not to mention, Pocket Card Jockey is extremely replayable, so getting your price worth is very easy. I’d recommend it for someone looking for a slight challenge, but slightly more involved than something from a smartphone.

The Positives

• Pocket Card Jockey is cute. It just has an art style and charm that makes you feel good. The player character is simple in design, looking like a doll and the horses are chubby with dots for eyes. Even the stats are “cutified” to be less dry. To use some of the horse’s excess stamina to get a boost, the player must pet the horse face icon with their stylus. Yes, you have to pet the horse to coax it to run faster.

• It’s pretty easy to pick up. The races get increasingly more challenging but losing isn’t detrimental to the overall game. On top of that, the game isn’t that hard to understand. You just play a simple card game and the rest is laid out pretty simply.

• The game was much more fun than I anticipated. The card game was easy enough to handle and somehow fit with the theme of the game. A better/faster streak of good cards give an even bigger boost to the next run. The other elements of the game such as your selection of horses and the skills attached to them, and even the strategy layer of telling the horse where to go didn’t feel too complicated, and yet all together it offered a nice level of challenge.

 

The Negatives

• The one thing that didn’t change between my initial thoughts on the game vs. the end result was the choice in platform. It works pretty well on 3DS. In fact, if it had to be on a traditional gaming platform, 3DS would be the best fit. The game could have easily been on iOS or Android as well. The game was perfect for pick-up-and-play style of gameplay, which smartphones are perfect for. This was more of a missed opportunity than a real complaint about the game.

• Sometimes the difficulty late game is less than forgiving. Where some games have a slight curve for the player when dealing with random chance, Pocket Card Junkies doesn’t seem to as often. Need a certain card to win late game? You probably won’t get it even if you’re really close to finishing first. Better try again and hope luck is in your favor! Most of the time, this is okay and to be expected in a videogame with cards, but sometimes it feels vendictive.

• The humor is lacking. It’s there. They wrote a script with humor in it, but it’s really wordy. It’s full of puns, something this humble writer lives by, but they come across very flat. Some of this could be the language barrier and a sub-par translation, but mostly it’s because they make a pun after explaining the same thing for the third time. Why didn’t you lead with that pun and then just let me flip cards!?

Pocket Card Jockey. When given the review code I thought, "What is this?" I thought there was no way it would be good. I thought it was another example of a game that should be on a smartphone and would be over priced on a handheld. Luckily for Nintendo, I was sorely mistaken!

Pocket Card Jockey was developed by Game Freak. Yes, the same people behind Pokemon! The adorable nature of the game is thanks to the same people who drew Pikachu. The player takes the role of a jockey. The jockey’s goal is to race horses and work their way up the ranks of horse racing. But the player doesn’t actually race the horse directly. No, instead the player must play a card game in order to boost the horse’s speed and stamina.

A very strange concept turns out to be a pretty fun game overall, as Pocket Card Jockey grabbed my attention for much longer than I expected. Between training with your horse, mastering the card game and unlocking skills, the game turns out to be pretty involved. Before a race begins, a miniature version of the card game is played. Getting to the bottom a card pile reveals one of the START cards with a random number of stars on it. These numbers range from 1 to 5 and the higher the number, the better the horse’s starting position is.

Beyond that, the player can lay out the path they want the horse to follow and between sequences, another game of cards is played. As stated before, the idea had me doubting the game, but I was surprised to find it quite enjoyable.