The debate about how much skill is involved in poker is a thorny one. Sure, there's a definite art to bluffing and noticing your opponent's "tells" (signs that they're trying to pull a fast one). The game certainly involves intuition and guts, with an aptitude for maths being useful too, but even the canniest pro can drown when the river throws up a third Jack for his opponent, overturning a sturdy pair of Aces in one unlucky swoop.

World Championship Poker 2 acknowledges the importance of tells in reality, and it allows you to switch into a first-person view to scan the computer players, which is an interesting idea in theory, but in practice the whole system is pretty daft as the signs given off by them are quite comical. On a good card being turned over, it's not uncommon for a player to be shouting "yes!" and punching the air.

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As a result, they're generally easier to read than a Peter and Jane book, and so are you because when you attempt to bluff a hand, a mini-game pops up which must be completed to avoid giving away a tell. Not only is this very artificial - poker buffs will doubtless hate the idea - it's also unnecessarily tricky. The aim is to keep a small section of a circle aligned as it spins around, but the difficulty level is such that you almost always fail.

Luckily, your poker character in the career mode comes with RPG-style stats, and you can invest the points earned by winning games to make you a better bluffer (which basically slows the spinning circle down and makes the mini-game crop up less often when you're lying about your hand strength). Other stats you can pump include your ability to gauge the oppositions' play styles, or the mathematical strength of your hand. These RPG elements are a novel twist on the PC poker genre, but the whole tell system really should have been left out.

However, the rest of the career mode is pretty sound. Starting from playing a simple game with friends in the basement, you work your way up to the pro tables and large hundred-player tournaments. It can be quite absorbing stuff and there's a good variety of poker to sample, with fourteen different styles ranging from the obligatory Texas Hold 'Em to the slightly dodgy-sounding Crazy Pineapple (in which the winner is the player wearing the loudest Hawaiian shirt, presumably).

Your winnings can be used to upgrade your humble basement apartment (with goodies such as a plasma TV or a couch from the Titanic, we kid you not) or to enter bigger tournaments. It's a shame that detailed player rankings aren't kept between matches, and the presentation is rather shoddy in general, with no option to ramp up the graphics from the default, grainy 640 x 480 resolution. This and the very clunky interface are clearly the results of the game being a straight console port, as is the fact that there's only one save game slot, which is a poor show.

There's a solid career mode here, with an interesting twist in the form of the RPG stats you can build up for your poker character. However, World Poker Championship 2 falls down on the interface and presentation fronts, not to mention the rather annoying tell mini-game.