Balatro Review: A Full House
At its core, Balatro is a roguelite deck builder loosely based on poker. There’s enough in that statement to get many players to walk away, but this isn’t a game you should dismiss so quickly. Like the best games in any genre, Balatro pushes beyond its influences and even its genre. While all of those elements are certainly pieces of the overall experience, Balatro offers far more than the sum of its parts.
Things start off simply enough in Balatro. You have a deck, which, at least in the early going, is a standard deck of playing cards. You start in a simple match where you draw cards and then have to play a hand. Each match has a target score you have to reach. Points are scored based on the cards you played, and that’s the game’s only real connection to poker. The scoring hands are the same as in poker, so you can play low hands like a single card or a pair, or you can try to build up to big hands like a four-of-a-kind or a royal flush.
Building Things Up
In most rounds, you’ll have a set number of hands you can play to reach the target score. You’ll also usually have the ability to discard cards and draw replacements a set number of times to chase the best-scoring hands. If you survive the round, you’ll be rewarded with some money for your efforts, which you can then use to improve your situation.
What sort of improvements? The sort that lets you break Balatro wide open. There are a handful of enhancements available in the shop between rounds. Planet cards allow you to level up specific hands so that they give more points than they did originally. Tarot cards offer many effects, but the most common ones will enable you to manipulate your cards for extra points or bonuses. Vouchers make permanent impacts for the rest of the run, allowing perhaps an extra discard each round or discounts in the store. You can even add additional cards to your deck, expanding beyond the 52-card starting point. This allows you to potentially even play hands that are impossible in real poker. There are a few other enhancements that are a bit more rare, which I’ll let you discover yourself.
Quite A Joke
Perhaps the most important way to improve your chances is through joker cards. These special cards all have a unique impact. By default, you can have up to five of these special cards at once and even rearrange them to get the best value out of them. How jokers impact your deck can vary wildly. Some will offer extra money. Others will add to your scoring multiplier or even multiply your multiplier. There are some very specific ones that will encourage you to build your deck around specific hand types. Many of these jokers play well together as well, so building a set of them that will maximize your scoring is crucial.
All of these improvements make a massive difference. In your first match, you only need to score 300 points. By the time you complete a run, you’ll need to score 100,000 and do so during special boss rounds where there will be special modifiers, which can make things far more difficult. Upon completing a run, you can even continue playing until you reach increasingly absurd scores. That it’s even possible to score millions of points in the same amount of time you once struggled to score even a few hundred points should illustrate how drastic these changes can be.
Starting Over
Upon your eventual defeat, you’ll have to start another run from scratch. That doesn’t mean there are no changes, though. You’ll unlock additional decks and other modifiers that allow for different ways to start future runs. You’ll also unlock new resources as you play. New jokers, new vouchers, lots of new things which allows for even more options in future runs. You can even unlock a challenge mode eventually, which allows for even more difficult runs if the main game ever starts to feel too easy.
Things rarely feel easy, though, which is one of my favorite things about Balatro. There are certainly runs where a set of jokers falls together, and you feel borderline invincible, but the strongest of those tend to rely on specific hands, and it only takes one round where the discards don’t go your way for that to fall apart.
If anything is an issue in Balatro, it would be nice to see a bit more balance between different strategies. While there are a lot of different jokers which do a lot of different things, some strategies are simply more viable than others. Some of them don’t scale as well, but if your goal is simply to complete runs, a few specific strategies, such as building around flushes, are simply more consistent and easier to win with. At its best, Balatro forces you to react to what comes your way and make the best of a vast variety of options. The moments when you feel pushed into certain common archetypes are its weakest.
Conclusion
Despite that, Balatro is an incredibly easy-to-learn deck builder with plenty of room for experimentation. Even after hundreds of runs, you’ll still encounter new options and combinations to twist your brain around. Even if roguelites and deck builders aren’t normally your favorite genres, Balatro is a game you need to check out.
Final Verdict: 4.5/5
Available on: PC (Reviewed), PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Switch; Publisher: Playstack; Developer: LocalThunk; Players: 1; Released: February 20th, 2024; ESRB: E10+ for Everyone 10+; MSRP: $14.99
Full disclosure: This review is based on a copy of Balatro provided by the publisher.
