This game is super addictive and, when your run works, so much fun that it's very easy to end up losing several hours without even noticing, and it makes me hopeful for the future of the roguelite genre, but it's also just not very fun in the long run as you begin to relize that victory is just always down to RNG, primarily because of a few pesky design decisions. Oh, and I'll start off this review by making one thing clear; you do not have to care about poker to like this game. I don't, I've always hated and sucked at poker, and I'm mostly loving Balatro, with a few major complaints.
I feel like describing this game is pretty pointless as everyone already knows about it. You play a sort of video poker that allows you to cheat and achieve ridiculous high scores through the combination of various run multipliers called jokers. That's the fun and addictive part. Anyone that has even minor liking of games probably already knows the basic poker hands and how to get started in this game. You load the game up, are presented with playing cards and you try to put together your first full house, straight or flush and then the dopamine hits start coming as bells, whistles and blinking lights start firing off to celebrate your success. The little scoreboard part of your HUD shoots up a little fire that gets larger and larger the higher your score gets, which is such a tiny but infinitely satisfying little detail. Playing your hand and darting your eyes over to the score display, hoping to see those flames shoot up, is a genius little design and this game excels at making you feel good about the hand you just played. Cards shake around as they score, bonus feature shake a little extra, text pops up to tell you that your score was multiplied. Everything about this game is feedback loop and everything about it makes you feel good.
Except for the RNG nature of the game, which is unavoidable with the current design. Since all you do is play poker hands, there's nothing you as a player can actively do if a match is going poorly. The only strategy and player agency is in the shop between rounds, where you buy various upgrades and put together a build, but if the RNG for both the shop and a match decides that you can't have the win this time, you can't have the win this time. Unlike action roguelites, where you can still pull out a win through godlike dodging even if your item collection for that run is the worst it can possibly be, having a bad build in Balatro simply means that you just lost. You can't, like, play a full house harder and more sneakily in order to pull out a win. RNG decides whether you win or lose in all situations. No matter the difficulty, if you do not have any form of score multiplier by the time the blind rises above 1000, you've lost that run and there's nothing you can do. This is personally why I believe that it's a major mistake that they take away that kind of crappy and very basic score multiplier card that you get as a beginner crutch in your first few runs. After you've finished the tutorial phase, that card is taken away and you start every run with 0 jokers after that, and I think they should just patch the game to put that joker back in. It's crappy enough that it cannot possibly win you a run, but it guarantees that your run might have a chance to get started, so that you don't hit 1000+ blind and lose through pure RNG, which does happen very often in this game. Every other run is a loss before you've even started, because the shop refuses to have any score multiplier jokers. This just is not fun anymore once you get over the initial romance period where you're just having fun without fully understanding what's going on.
It doesn't help that I think the boss blinds are a completely failed experiment, since they just add even more RNG, and the solution for shitty bosses is just more RNG since you have to luck into the item that lets you reroll boss functionality (as well as enough money to actually use it). What do you do when you hit the "very large blind" boss with a run that's almost good, but still needs a little something to clear endgame? You lose, that's what. Similarly, what do you do if RNG decided that you were going to play a Half Jokar pairs run and you run into the boss that won't let you play repeat hands? You lose, of course. What if your build is amazing and centered around Blueprint and the other one I haven't learned the name of, both of which need exact positioning in your joker inventory to work, and you get the boss that mixes your jokers around and hides them, effectively destroying your whole build? You lose, obviously. It doesn't help that I hear that the PC version has made progress on improving these bullshit bosses and that this is the kind of indie that wasn't ready for all of the success, so now there's major issues with platform parity and the console versions are apparently months behind the PC version. Our version of Yorick, the legendary joker, is still useless and I hear that one was fixed like two months ago on PC. I get that LocalThunk is one person, but this game is also a smash hit that has made a significant amount of money. Time to actually spend some of that fat pile of cash on a porting team that can work faster than this.
Also, to be clear, I've unlocked about 95% of the collection, I've beaten all decks but the last 5, my best deck is currently on purple stake and my best hand ever scored 7 million points. I'm not an expert and I've never had one of those insane runs that break the game, but I'm not a novice that doesn't udnerstand the game yet and am just complaining because I don't like losing. I've paid my dues and put in my hours in this game.
All of that complaining aside, I do still enjoy this game and I plan to keep working at beating the game with every deck and trying to unlock all jokers, in the hopes that the console version is finally brought up to parity, but above all, this game makes me hopeful for the whole genre. The game and it's massive unexpected success makes me hope and wish that developers will finally find their way back to what made roguelites so popular. It's the items! It's not these stupid metaprogression unlock systems that the genre is obsessed with over the past like 5 years. It's the items! It's always the items! Balatro is a throwback to about a decade ago, when the items actually mattered and made major changes to your run, keeping things fresh and always keeping you addicted to the idea of "what if I manage to find item X and Y on the same run..." There's a reason The Binding of Isaac is legendary, yet no one cares about the past year's crop of popular (in the community) roguelites like Astral Ascent. It's! The! Items! Stop focusing so much on stupid metaprogression systems and go back to working on having fun, inventive and quirky items that completely mutate your run into something entirely different. I absoluetly love that LocalThunk and Balatro understand this very key concept of roguelites, and I'm hoping the success makes both players and developers re-discover the glory of what a roguelite can be. Stop putting in 7000 unlocks that unlock more unlocks and focus on the items and the builds that they can combine into!
If it wasn't for the RNG, and how the game begins to feel frustrating as you progress from not having any idea what's going on to understanding how to create some basic builds and what jokers are amazing, I would've given this game a perfect score, since it's so much fun despite being an RNG fest that I normally can't stand, and I'm going to love the game even more if it actually does manage to shape the future of roguelites, but at the end of the day, I can't get away from how frustrated I get with wasting my time on a run that could never have been won in the first place and I'm not sure how the design can really be tweaked to be better, aside from just throwing boss blinds out completely. I do hope that this game sees a lifetime sort of like Isaac's and that it changes, shifts and grows over the coming years. I will be checking in on each major content update because there is something special here, even if I don't always love it. I'm still giving this game a high score based on the pure fun factor and how strongly I recommend that you give this game a shot. Balatro is not just the kind of game that has a chance at revitalizing the genre it inhabits, but if you're in a gaming slump, this is the kind of game that might revitalize your love of the gaming hobby as a whole. You really should check it out if you are somehow still on the fence.
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After playing more, I would do the following changes:
- Permanently remove all tarot and planet cards from the shop. Only add them when you buy the voucher for them. Shop is way too cluttered with junk.
- Add one of each type of booster to the shop permanently, but make the type randomized. So, always a buffoon, tarot and planetary pack in the shop, but whether it's regular, mega or a spectral pack is random. This will allow for specific and strategic spending, but won't guarantee a win in any way. Just additional and more precise options for more strategy.
- Make the ability to reroll the boss once a built-in feature, change the voucher to make the first one turn the first reroll free, then the second voucher can do what it currently does. Now you won't have your run completely destroyed by one unfairly chosen boss blind out of nowhere and can at least stand a chance at winning.
- Honestly, just fuck off with "perishable" and "rental" jokers on the highest difficulty. If those tags have to be in the game, they should not be insanely common like they currently are. They should be very rare since they basically make the joker completely useless and it might as well not have been in there. Maybe this could be fixed with more specific choices, like how the joker simply named Joker could have a high chance to get "perishable", since that makes sense for it, but Blueprint can never get "perishable" because that joker is made entirely useless by that tag and seeing a perishable Blueprint is just about as feelbad as you can get in this game. I've had the first shop contain a rental persihable Brainstorm and that just made me quit the game for that day.
I feel like describing this game is pretty pointless as everyone already knows about it. You play a sort of video poker that allows you to cheat and achieve ridiculous high scores through the combination of various run multipliers called jokers. That's the fun and addictive part. Anyone that has even minor liking of games probably already knows the basic poker hands and how to get started in this game. You load the game up, are presented with playing cards and you try to put together your first full house, straight or flush and then the dopamine hits start coming as bells, whistles and blinking lights start firing off to celebrate your success. The little scoreboard part of your HUD shoots up a little fire that gets larger and larger the higher your score gets, which is such a tiny but infinitely satisfying little detail. Playing your hand and darting your eyes over to the score display, hoping to see those flames shoot up, is a genius little design and this game excels at making you feel good about the hand you just played. Cards shake around as they score, bonus feature shake a little extra, text pops up to tell you that your score was multiplied. Everything about this game is feedback loop and everything about it makes you feel good.
Except for the RNG nature of the game, which is unavoidable with the current design. Since all you do is play poker hands, there's nothing you as a player can actively do if a match is going poorly. The only strategy and player agency is in the shop between rounds, where you buy various upgrades and put together a build, but if the RNG for both the shop and a match decides that you can't have the win this time, you can't have the win this time. Unlike action roguelites, where you can still pull out a win through godlike dodging even if your item collection for that run is the worst it can possibly be, having a bad build in Balatro simply means that you just lost. You can't, like, play a full house harder and more sneakily in order to pull out a win. RNG decides whether you win or lose in all situations. No matter the difficulty, if you do not have any form of score multiplier by the time the blind rises above 1000, you've lost that run and there's nothing you can do. This is personally why I believe that it's a major mistake that they take away that kind of crappy and very basic score multiplier card that you get as a beginner crutch in your first few runs. After you've finished the tutorial phase, that card is taken away and you start every run with 0 jokers after that, and I think they should just patch the game to put that joker back in. It's crappy enough that it cannot possibly win you a run, but it guarantees that your run might have a chance to get started, so that you don't hit 1000+ blind and lose through pure RNG, which does happen very often in this game. Every other run is a loss before you've even started, because the shop refuses to have any score multiplier jokers. This just is not fun anymore once you get over the initial romance period where you're just having fun without fully understanding what's going on.
It doesn't help that I think the boss blinds are a completely failed experiment, since they just add even more RNG, and the solution for shitty bosses is just more RNG since you have to luck into the item that lets you reroll boss functionality (as well as enough money to actually use it). What do you do when you hit the "very large blind" boss with a run that's almost good, but still needs a little something to clear endgame? You lose, that's what. Similarly, what do you do if RNG decided that you were going to play a Half Jokar pairs run and you run into the boss that won't let you play repeat hands? You lose, of course. What if your build is amazing and centered around Blueprint and the other one I haven't learned the name of, both of which need exact positioning in your joker inventory to work, and you get the boss that mixes your jokers around and hides them, effectively destroying your whole build? You lose, obviously. It doesn't help that I hear that the PC version has made progress on improving these bullshit bosses and that this is the kind of indie that wasn't ready for all of the success, so now there's major issues with platform parity and the console versions are apparently months behind the PC version. Our version of Yorick, the legendary joker, is still useless and I hear that one was fixed like two months ago on PC. I get that LocalThunk is one person, but this game is also a smash hit that has made a significant amount of money. Time to actually spend some of that fat pile of cash on a porting team that can work faster than this.
Also, to be clear, I've unlocked about 95% of the collection, I've beaten all decks but the last 5, my best deck is currently on purple stake and my best hand ever scored 7 million points. I'm not an expert and I've never had one of those insane runs that break the game, but I'm not a novice that doesn't udnerstand the game yet and am just complaining because I don't like losing. I've paid my dues and put in my hours in this game.
All of that complaining aside, I do still enjoy this game and I plan to keep working at beating the game with every deck and trying to unlock all jokers, in the hopes that the console version is finally brought up to parity, but above all, this game makes me hopeful for the whole genre. The game and it's massive unexpected success makes me hope and wish that developers will finally find their way back to what made roguelites so popular. It's the items! It's not these stupid metaprogression unlock systems that the genre is obsessed with over the past like 5 years. It's the items! It's always the items! Balatro is a throwback to about a decade ago, when the items actually mattered and made major changes to your run, keeping things fresh and always keeping you addicted to the idea of "what if I manage to find item X and Y on the same run..." There's a reason The Binding of Isaac is legendary, yet no one cares about the past year's crop of popular (in the community) roguelites like Astral Ascent. It's! The! Items! Stop focusing so much on stupid metaprogression systems and go back to working on having fun, inventive and quirky items that completely mutate your run into something entirely different. I absoluetly love that LocalThunk and Balatro understand this very key concept of roguelites, and I'm hoping the success makes both players and developers re-discover the glory of what a roguelite can be. Stop putting in 7000 unlocks that unlock more unlocks and focus on the items and the builds that they can combine into!
If it wasn't for the RNG, and how the game begins to feel frustrating as you progress from not having any idea what's going on to understanding how to create some basic builds and what jokers are amazing, I would've given this game a perfect score, since it's so much fun despite being an RNG fest that I normally can't stand, and I'm going to love the game even more if it actually does manage to shape the future of roguelites, but at the end of the day, I can't get away from how frustrated I get with wasting my time on a run that could never have been won in the first place and I'm not sure how the design can really be tweaked to be better, aside from just throwing boss blinds out completely. I do hope that this game sees a lifetime sort of like Isaac's and that it changes, shifts and grows over the coming years. I will be checking in on each major content update because there is something special here, even if I don't always love it. I'm still giving this game a high score based on the pure fun factor and how strongly I recommend that you give this game a shot. Balatro is not just the kind of game that has a chance at revitalizing the genre it inhabits, but if you're in a gaming slump, this is the kind of game that might revitalize your love of the gaming hobby as a whole. You really should check it out if you are somehow still on the fence.
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After playing more, I would do the following changes:
- Permanently remove all tarot and planet cards from the shop. Only add them when you buy the voucher for them. Shop is way too cluttered with junk.
- Add one of each type of booster to the shop permanently, but make the type randomized. So, always a buffoon, tarot and planetary pack in the shop, but whether it's regular, mega or a spectral pack is random. This will allow for specific and strategic spending, but won't guarantee a win in any way. Just additional and more precise options for more strategy.
- Make the ability to reroll the boss once a built-in feature, change the voucher to make the first one turn the first reroll free, then the second voucher can do what it currently does. Now you won't have your run completely destroyed by one unfairly chosen boss blind out of nowhere and can at least stand a chance at winning.
- Honestly, just fuck off with "perishable" and "rental" jokers on the highest difficulty. If those tags have to be in the game, they should not be insanely common like they currently are. They should be very rare since they basically make the joker completely useless and it might as well not have been in there. Maybe this could be fixed with more specific choices, like how the joker simply named Joker could have a high chance to get "perishable", since that makes sense for it, but Blueprint can never get "perishable" because that joker is made entirely useless by that tag and seeing a perishable Blueprint is just about as feelbad as you can get in this game. I've had the first shop contain a rental persihable Brainstorm and that just made me quit the game for that day.