Balatro Review

You know you have discovered an excellent game when you can’t stop thinking about it even when you’re not playing it. When I requested to review Balatro I was warned that my productivity for the week would be ruined. The kind chap from publisher Playstack wasn’t wrong, this game is insanely addictive to the point that it will be a certain habitual play for long into the distant future. If you’re an avid Poker fan like myself then you’ll want to give this one your time, because it is a moreish poker-inspired rogue-lite where no two runs ever feel the same.

Believe it or not, I learnt to play poker on the Xbox 360 with the popular arcade game Texas Hold Em. But here you just need the basics of how to build hands and understand blinds/ante. If you have that underpinning knowledge, the rest will come naturally to you. Equally, I feel it would be easy for a beginner in the Poker world to learn how to build hands here if they wanted to go on to play the actual game of Poker in future. But for established players of the most popular card game in the world, Balatro is incredible, read on to learn why!

Isn’t it Just Poker Though?

Not really, you won’t be placing bets and bluffing your opponents but the scoring hands of Poker are the foundations of the game. If you’re not familiar with which hands are more fruitful than others then there is a handy guide to glance at during the game if you wish. You’ll start with a handful of cards to play with and you can put forward your most advantageous hands, however, you only have a limited amount of hands you can play with. If you’re unhappy with the cards you have to hand then you can discard up to five at a time, again for a limited amount of times. If you discard too much too early then you face dealing with whatever cards you have to hand.

Play Your Cards Right!

Each time you play you have to match the blind score which increases with each round. Here is where things get interesting though, jokers push up the multiplier rate to make your hands score more lucrative and planetary cards will increase the scoring of the hands. For example, purchase a planetary card for a full house and it’ll go from x1 to x2 and so on. I found myself piling these cards into two pair, straights and flushes as these were my most frequently played hands, but you may be different.

Tarot cards add an extra layer to the game and these will present several tricks and buffs to the gameplay. It could be presenting you with two planetary cards, turning three cards of your choice to a particular suit or raising the multiplier or chip rate to a certain card. Playing around with these various cards will prepare you for success but could ultimately set you up for failure if you don’t play wisely as some blinds you’ll play against are pretty brutal.

What Do You Mean My Spades Are Debuffed?

Every third round you’ll see a blind that will be much more testing to play. It could be that a certain face card or suit has been debuffed and won’t score you anything. It could be that your face cards are flipped over and you have no idea what is underneath. There are many more to discover as you play through but ultimately these will test you and if you have balanced your multipliers correctly and are wise with discards, you may just make it to the very end! It is super satisfying when you manage to fly through these in one or two hands because you have some powerful jokers and have levelled up in areas. But it is frustratingly interesting to try and struggle through when the deck hasn’t gone in your favour.

Mindful Shopping

Between each round, you’ll have some chips to play with which you can invest in vouchers, jokers, tarot cards, planetary cards and card packs. Obviously, with limited funds, you’ll be choosing where to spend. Vouchers are generally $10 but have some good incentives that will pay off such as a permanent extra hand each round or a permanent discard, lower pack prices and more.

Getting some jokers on board early on is always good to fly through the early stages but you may want to rotate these out between rounds if they aren’t working for you, you can sell them to get some funds back. You can have a maximum of five jokers at one time and two slots for tarot/planetary cards. If you choose not to buy something one round, the money will remain in your pocket and you can build up the funds, the shop items may alter though, but they can be re-rolled for a fee!

Visuals & Audio

Visually Balatro takes a basic retro style aesthetic that presents the look of playing on a CRT television, but it is put across neatly. You can also tweak some of the features of your display in the settings and play around with contrasts to your tastes. The music can be quite repetitive, but I enjoy it and it appears to suit the atmosphere of the game. I enjoy the touch of transition of blending out the music in pivotal moments of gameplay. It is difficult to be critical about any portion of Balatro but I would like to see maybe some more music added with a rotational playlist perhaps, but it isn’t the end of the world if not!

The design of the cards is fantastic, 150 joker cards all with different designs, spectral, tarot and vibrant card packs to open in between rounds. There is a great whack of cards, packs, buffs and more to discover and between each run, you can look through the menu to see which ones you have discovered. I also love the deep stat tracking of how many times you have played particular cards. The possibility of adding more to the already meaty load of cards on offer is endless, I’d love to see the developer add even more over time.

It Is Aces All Round!

Balatro is like nothing I’ve ever played in my entire life, it is a game that had its hooks in me from the beginning. It is a seemingly endless game to me; hours feel like minutes. It’s a game where you can have much fun whilst multi-tasking with your favourite music or podcasts. I adore how adaptive you have to be with each run and how you have to figure out how to get the most out of your hands. Without realising it, it is one of the most deep strategic card games I’ve ever invested time in and it does it uniquely and simplistically.

To give you some idea of how addictive this title is, I sacrificed my usual go-to Call Of Duty nights on a double XP weekend and favoured this instead. Over five days I have invested over 30 hours into this with no signs of stopping. For the low price of £12.79, it is an absolute steal for the return in hours you’ll gain from the experience. I am now looking at where I can get my fix from on the move, so those who own Nintendo Switch or Steam Deck can also purchase a copy there and with the game being light on space it is a no-brainer. Balatro is my life now and has cemented a permanent place on my hard drive, I can’t stop playing and I won’t stop playing!