GBAtemp Recommends: Uno
When you’re hanging out with your friends, but not in the mood to play a video game, you might bust out a board game, or if you really want some fun without much setup, you’ll grab a card game. Uno is reliable--always there for you when you need it. Just shuffle some cards, deal them out, and you’re on your way.
In these wild and weird times, you might not be leaving the house to go to your friends’ as often. Or maybe, you don’t even own a physical deck of Uno to play with your family, and Amazon won’t ship for another six weeks. But that’s okay, because Ubisoft understands that sometimes, you need to grab the license to release a video game based off a classic card game and make a new version of it every few years. Or rather, ever since the pack-in title of Uno on the Xbox 360, everyone seems to enjoy a good old fashioned internet Uno party, so might as well capitalize on that.
Recently discovered during an eShop sale, by way of friend recommendation is Uno, released in 2016 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Steam, with a Nintendo Switch version that arrived the following year. Gone may be the days where you could play on Xbox Live camera with randoms, but with the advent of modern gaming, you now have DLC that you can purchase, for Uno. All your dreams have come true, because thanks to Ubisoft and this release of Uno, you can play with themed Rabbids or Just Dance card decks.
It gets better from here, I promise.
Uno on consoles is a simple affair: all you need to do is start an online lobby, and invite your friends in. There’s something nice to the ease and lack of effort needed to get a game going. You just hop on whatever platform, get into a voice call with your friends, and start having fun. The simplicity is the beauty of this game.
If you ever tire of playing by the vanilla rules, one of the best features in Ubi-Uno is that you can tweak all sorts of ridiculous modifiers on or off. There’s some real gems here, like forcing everyone to swap their hand when a 0 is played, or allowing for +2 cards to be stacked, or my personal favorite, the always-insane “jump in” rule where if you have a duplicate card as to what was just played, you can play it, even if it’s not your turn. It spices up Uno in all the right ways, by introducing even more chaos than a usual match. The aforementioned DLC isn't even the worst, as it adds weird cards into the mix, such as the Rabbids deck, which has a card that forces you to make your turn in under 3 seconds, or the newly release Uno Flip, which adds its own major changes to the game.
There are some weird quirks that Ubisoft haven’t managed to iron out, such as the fact that setting a lobby to private doesn’t actually do that, allowing for anyone and everyone to join in on a private game, but that also lends a little insane fun to this version of Uno. Each random that stumbles into your game midway through adopts their own personality amidst your group’s overly loud voice chats; “did they REALLY just skip me three times in a row? How dare you, xXUltimateUnoManXx”! Or “heck yeah, AI Pudding just screwed over the guy to my left, I love you, Pudding”! It’s ridiculous enough that it works, especially well during your fifth match in a row, taking place at 3 in the morning, while your party’s sanity has slowly dissolved into nothing.
For a mere $10, or even half that when on sale which it is on the Switch, it’s something that you and your group of friends can all buy together without breaking the bank, and will last you weeks of fun and hilarity, giving you an excuse to get together and have those social gaming sessions.
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