Gamble With Your Friends Review

In terms of games, there's one type that does not require you to pour millions of dollars into production and an expansive universe to have an experience to remember. This is the case with Gamble With Your Friends. This indie multiplayer game somehow manages to deliver some of the best experiences for creating memories with your friends online.

While the creators didn't necessarily seek to revolutionize this genre, their efforts definitely seem innovative, taking a completely unique direction amid a sea of other co-op psychological horror or stress-simulation games. Gamble With Your Friends emerged on the scene as a multiplayer co-op game based on one simple, silly premise.

You and your friends owe a great deal of money to a loan shark, and you need to pay off debts by gambling your way through Jeff Booth's casino.

This is the premise, and nothing beyond that. You do not have a chance to save the planet, nor will you be uncovering any mysterious secret. You are simply a bunch of people having serious money troubles, trying to gamble their way out of the fiasco. The story isn't trying to become something bigger than itself, either.

Not only are you and your group of friends indebted, but you are also taken to and from the casino every day in a manner that makes you seem like a convict on house arrest, and if you fail to produce the required amount per day, your run will end with one of the most hilariously disturbing endings ever: you'll be murdered and dumped in a cornfield. The comedy aspect to all of this is executed very well.

The overall orchestrator appears to be Jeff Booth, because he profits regardless of whether you win or lose everything that you brought into his establishment. It isn't a story that makes one reflect, but it brilliantly captures the essence of everything. Now, the actual gameplay is where Gamble With Your Friends really comes alive.

Every day, you and your group share a single bank account and have around five minutes inside the casino to earn enough money to meet a rising quota. The minimum bets and potential payouts scale upward as you progress through the days, meaning the stakes keep climbing no matter what. If you hit your quota before time runs out, you can either leave early and bank what you've made or keep pushing for more.

That decision alone creates some genuinely tense moments within your group.

All in all, there are seventeen different casino games on different floors, including Blackjack, Roulette, Keno, Plinko, slot machines, duck races, and Crash, in which you are playing against a digital rocket climbing up, waiting for it to explode. The diversity is good enough, and the fact that, as you move to a different floor, meaning surviving more days, new casino games requiring more money are available to you makes the process more engaging.

Moving on to the fourth floor and beyond feels like an actual accomplishment after the extremely harsh first days. Another nice thing about this gambling experience is a ticket-based system of daily challenges that lets you buy items to tilt the odds in your favor. Speaking of items, this is one of the most entertaining parts of Gamble With Your Friends.

Golden Chip is an example of a power-up that gives the players the chance to maximize the betting limit without paying from the collective pot. The Holy Statue ensures no losses occur during the game. On the other hand, some of the cards that cause chaos are the Devil Reel, which has the potential to triple a player's last winnings or cancel out the last win for good.

Some of the weapons include the gun used to remove a body part belonging to one's partner, resulting in a profit; there is also the baseball bat that causes a ragdoll effect on one's teammate. One of the most unusual aspects of the game that deserves to be pointed out in this case is the mechanic involving the sale of parts of one's body.

Indeed, it appears that it would be an utterly crazy idea, except for the fact that once in the game, it turns into one of its unique traits. Losing an eye results in the blackening of part of your screen, while losing your entire body means that the player cannot move anymore, only roll around.

Such mechanics perfectly complement the game's plot about doing whatever it takes to repay a debt. But it is precisely because of the extent to which Gamble With Your Friends depends on dynamics to provide its best moments that the game is truly unique.

The communal bank fund creates a situation in which decisions made by one person affect everyone.

The feeling when someone chooses to put everything on the last thirty seconds' spin of the slot machine in the final few moments before time runs out? You can imagine. The sense that someone quietly won enough on Blackjack to help the entire team clear the quota? That happens too. Sometimes it seems as though Gambling with your Friends is the only way to reveal what kind of person your friend really is under pressure, but oftentimes it's not pretty.

Accessibility features in Gamble With Your Friends should not be overlooked. Camera bobbing, camera smoothing, and smoothing amount are available as an option, and for those who have trouble with motion sickness when playing FPS games, this may be helpful. It does not work wonders for all players suffering from motion sickness, and the idea of creating a third-person mode has been suggested among the community.

Yet the mere presence of such options indicates that the developers thought of something. Moreover, the game offers plenty of ways to customize characters' appearances and more than 50 achievements to earn. Gamble With Your Friends is a very distinctive game aesthetically. There's no attempt at realism, as the game takes an artistic, stylized approach, giving it a somewhat cartoonish feel.

Even things as mundane as the casino floor or the menus have personalities of their own. It's a style that speaks volumes about the type of game you're playing before you even get started. It's both charming and slightly chaotic in its execution, just like the gameplay. While it may seem simply down to budget limitations, the art style actually works well across all the game's locations.

There isn't much difference between the sound design and the surrounding environment. The ambiance, and in general, the soundscape of the casino is quite good.

It's not a soundtrack you'll be listening to outside of the game, but it does exactly what it needs to do while you're in a session; it keeps the tension going and adds to the immersive feeling of actually being inside a very strange, very dangerous casino. That said, Gamble With Your Friends isn't without its rough edges, and the community has been pretty vocal about some of them.

The five-minute time limit inside the casino is one of the most common points of friction. Once you get comfortable with the game, hitting quota can happen quickly, leaving you with several minutes to spare and not much to do with the extra time. On the flip side, if you're still finding your footing, five minutes can feel brutally short. There's no real middle ground there, and some players feel the sessions need to be longer to let things breathe properly.

Another point worth making about the quota system is that once you exceed 100% of the quota, you no longer gain anything from it; instead, you receive an increased quota the following day, essentially penalizing yourself for exceeding the required amount. This has been observed by many other players, who argue that it takes away all motivation to exceed the minimum and that success feels like simply rushing through to take the elevator, rather than truly striving to achieve more.

It would make a lot of sense for the game to reward players who go significantly beyond their quota, whether through upgraded furniture that provides passive stat bonuses, special collectibles, or permanent stat boosts. Currently, there is no extra reward for massively exceeding the minimum, and the ticket system has the same problem since teams earn the same number of tickets regardless.

That means someone who earns five times the required amount walks away with the same tickets as someone who just barely made it. It kills any motivation to really go for it, and it's the kind of thing that feels like a straightforward fix: scaling ticket rewards based on how far above quota you land would go a long way toward making big wins feel genuinely worth chasing rather than just a number on a screen.

The single-player aspect of Gamble With Your Friends is worth mentioning in case you decide to try it solo.

The game is designed for group play; when played alone, it loses many of its gameplay elements. This includes the fun of the ensuing chaos, the tension of playing with other people, and the joy of seeing someone ruin things by making an awful decision with the pool of money. If you don't have friends who can play regularly, the game becomes quite empty.

There have also been a couple of technical issues after the release, from broken achievements and an extremely memorable glitch, when earning an absolutely crazy amount of money made the game perform an integer overflow and bricked save files, to a couple of interactions that caused lobbies to crash depending on what items the player had. The positive side is that the developers seem to be working on it and definitely care about the product, so they do fix problems as they arise.

At the end of the day, Gamble With Your Friends is the kind of game that delivers exactly what it promises and a little more. It's chaotic, it's funny, it's surprisingly tense, and it creates the kind of shared experiences that you don't really get from bigger, more polished titles. It has real flaws; the quota system needs work, solo play is underwhelming, and the sessions can feel either too short or too aimless depending on how your run is going.

But none of those things stop it from being a genuinely enjoyable co-op experience when played with the right people. For what you pay, which has been available for under five euros in some regions, the value is hard to argue with. If you've got a few friends who are down for something casual, low-stakes to get into but surprisingly high-stakes once you're in it, and don't mind the occasional session ending in chaos and mild resentment, Gamble With Your Friends is worth your time.

This game beautifully captures that feeling of friends doing something slightly unhinged together and coming out the other side with stories to tell. There are three different endings to discover, which gives you a reason to come back even after you've seen one run through to completion, and the combination of achievements and varied casino games means there's always something you haven't quite done yet.