Balatro review - a poker-based deckbuilder worth your time

There's something satisfying about seeing numbers go up.

Balatro, a poker-inspired roguelike deckbuilder, knows this. It's a game that's about you synergising your cards and Jokers, often in the hope of creating broken builds. The pay-off hits when you make a difficult boss blind a pushover and ridiculously easy to clear.

Each level requires you to beat a blind, essentially a chips target, within a set number of hands and discards.

What poker hand you play — for example, a three-of-a-kind, a straight, two pairs, and so on — determines your base chips score and multiplier. But the cards you play and the bonuses from the Jokers in your possession can exponentially add to your chips score and multiplier.

LocalThunk / Playstack (via Digital Spy)

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In the first few levels, your hands are worth just a few hundred, but 20 levels later, you're looking at scores of hundreds of thousands and even millions. It's a thrill.

A big part of getting obscene numbers is making decisions about your deck. The game encourages you to essentially 'cheat' to give yourself the best possible chance of winning.

Let's say early on, you've locked yourself into a strategy centred on playing flushes, specifically hearts. Some random tarot cards, if you are fortunate to see them, allow you to remove cards from your deck or switch their suits — useful for helping to stack the deck with hearts. (Other tarot cards do other things.)

When given the chance, you might also want to enhance your cards, giving as many hearts cards as you can an additional multiplier.

Similarly, the Jokers that you hold have a huge effect on your strategy. If you're targeting flushes, you want Jokers that complement that. You can only hold a limited number of Jokers at any one time, so sometimes there is a trade-off to consider when deciding which ones to keep.

A Joker that allows flushes to be made with just four cards instead of five makes playing a flush a lot easier — after all, this is still poker — but doesn't provide any sort of score boost (unless it's a special variant).

LocalThunk / Playstack (via Digital Spy)

There are 150 different Jokers in the game, so the number of combinations is vast. Some can alter your strategy midway through a run.

It's rewarding when you craft something that is cohesive and that ends up synergising extremely well.

That's not covering everything, either. Blinds can be skipped for a reward, but the drawback is you lose out on earning money and visiting the shop for one round. Boss blinds have a random twist you have to navigate — maybe some drawn cards are face down, maybe you can only play one hand for the whole round, maybe a whole suit is debuffed — which can be a run-breaker if you're unprepared.

Money is also a crucial factor, as upgrading your deck and acquiring Jokers are mostly done through the shop. At the same time, cash can be very tight particularly early on, so you have to consider the most efficient way to both earn and spend.

How Balatro combines poker and deckbuilding is captivating, and it manages to be a fresh take on both concepts.

LocalThunk / Playstack (via Digital Spy)

However, the poker inspiration at the game's core does lead to a few moments of frustration.

You'll arrive at moments where you're relying on the last draw of cards, praying for an eight, a face card, or a spade, only to be let down when luck deserts you. It's reminiscent of actual poker in a way, but this doesn't prevent a game over in that scenario from feeling pretty deflating when it's a run you've heavily invested in.

The genre is at its very best when losing becomes a learning experience, and while a Balatro run that ends due to a slice of bad luck can still be analysed, the role that chance plays can provoke a more negative immediate reaction than we would have liked.

Yet, we always kept coming back for another run, because the highs made the frustrations worth enduring.

It's easy to get a kick out of seeing how high the scores can get, but the game is as much about the gambles you take and the planning along the way. There's a deceptive simplicity to Balatro due to its roots in poker, and it uses that to its advantage to reel you in while regularly finding new ways to surprise you.