Aces® Hearts

After trying most of the Hearts card games in the App Store, Aces Hearts ended up being my favorite and the one I've been enjoying for years now. It has the smoothest animation, game flow and by far the best designed controls of all the Hearts games I've tried. It's the only one that offers the exact card animation speed that I prefer. Also,you can tap to skip animations when you want to speed things up. No other game I tried can do that. The UX is so nice, most other Hearts games feel amateurish by comparison. Also, I haven't had any login or other technical problems in years. I came here to leave a 5-star review in appreciation and was shocked to find I had left a harsh 2-star review many years ago and forgot about it. The two highlighted Store reviews are out-of-date (one of them is 4 years old). Yes, the game engine could be improved in a couple places—such as opponents giving up their high hearts too quickly on the hardest mode when it should be obvious you're making a run to shoot the moon. For me, the next hardest mode below that can often be harder to beat. None of the games I've tried have been perfect when it comes to emulating human players of various skill levels. Nevertheless, Aces Hearts is one of the best.

Edit 5/2/21: Obviously, the developer(s) have abandoned this addictive game, BUT, if they do revisit reviews, I’d like to see an update to the algorithm: 1) When I’m obviously “running” the game, other computer players automatically dump all their high hearts. That would never happen with all humans playing. 2) When playing the Jack of Diamond version (my favorite), adjust the algorithm with the computer opponents not to give up the Jack when they have other diamonds in their hand. If the developer can fix those items above, this would be the most enjoyable card game in the store - imho. I was forced to re-purchase this latest version to get rid of the ads even though I paid for the app several years ago. The animation is choppy and I can barely see the differences between hearts and diamonds (spades & clubs) because of the new tiny image size on the card faces. I do like that you can see the current score of each player during play. This was my favorite go to game - previous version was very professionally built and seemed to be pretty challenging yet predictable play (please make it more difficult!). The ads are EXTREMELY obnoxious so pay up to really get full enjoyment out of this classic game...

For some reason they screw the game up every 8 to 12 months or so. For example, around May 2018 the app simply cannot log any won games - every game is now logged as a loss in the stats section. Last year the app randomly started hanging when you took the queen of spades. It took them a month or two to fix it, wonder when they will fix this current issue. It’s an OLD game, what is there to update? Ever heard of quality assurance testing before going live? Poor quality updates for what should be an easy app to keep running.