3/5 ★ – beemancer's review of Balatro.

Balatro is in a good spot for deck-builders. It's accessible and addictive, but it comes at the cost of depth. It's different enough from even other poker based deck-builders that it feels novel and interesting, and it satisfies this weird instinct we have to make numbers go up. Visually, Balatro is a little bland. The UI is clean, but there's no variety. The background music is nice, but I got tired of it and switched to my own music pretty quickly. I think Balatro could've benefited from some actual art or some visual enhancement for bosses. It already had this Joker and Tarot angle going, they could've leaned into it. As is, the game feels more like an upgraded solitaire than a deck-builder, or perhaps more like a video poker machine. That may be where some of the addictive quality comes from: rather than fancy art it just has little dopamine hits and flashing lights to keep me distracted. I think the main thing that keeps me from wanting to come back for more is the lack of player agency compared to other deck-builders. There's always RNG in these sorts of games, but Balatro makes it a core part of the experience. This is what makes it accessible, but it also makes reaching for more difficult achievements substantially more frustrating. Once you know what works and what doesn't you're kind of stuck resetting for a good set of jokers, regardless of if your goal is clearing Ante 8 on the highest difficulty or if you're playing to ascend into endless. Speaking of endless mode, this game has a bit of trouble with scaling. This is not a game where you frequently win by inches, you usually either beat the level with incredible ease or fall short by a few orders of magnitude. The scaling is reasonable up until Ante 8, but after that it starts accelerating. Around Ante 12, the small blind of the next Ante is over a hundred times larger than the boss of the previous ante, and it only gets worse. There's very little granularity in judging how well you did, because almost all of the most insane decks die on Ante 12 or 13. Very, very few setups can make it further, because there's only a few ways to scale that exponentially. The game is still a good time. It's not brain-off by any means, but there's enough random bullshit in there to at least blame the game sometimes. The game makes satisfying noises and the numbers do in fact go up, and sometimes that's all you need.