4/5 ★ – sirvalkyerie's review of Balatro.

Balatro is good, and I think in a year with a relative dearth of truly top-tier gaming experiences, it is worthy of its Game of the Year nominations. But I still think the hype is a bit too much. The game is good fun so I don't want the review to seem too harsh for a game I'm scoring a 4 out of 5, but I do think the hype it's generated feels a tad overblown. The basic premise is quite clever. Poker but with roguelite elements. It's so simple and familiar that it's truly a wonder it hasn't been done before. More specifically you're playing a multi-round five card draw that accumulates a score. If you pass the target score within a limit of hands, you win. Making it a bit more like a prolonged multi-deal blackjack scenario. As you add description, it becomes less simple. Which is what gives the game some legs. However, the game sort of spills its load too early. The scoring can be a bit convoluted, however on its face it is what you expect of poker. High card through Four of a Kind, each hand you play scores higher than the one below it. But you receive all variety of powerups and boost and finaglings that increase multipliers such that you build a strategy around deploying two pair, for instance. You add new cards to your deck, even remove others, and new effects to cards such that by the end of the run you're hardly playing anything that resembles poker in anyway other than the 52-card deck with four suits. It's all the zany power increasing, game changing mechanicery you see in any other like-roguelite. So what you really get is something that feels a little more like Slay the Spire. A deckbuilding roguelite. But I think this is where Balatro ultimately falls short to me. Within your first three or four runs you will have seen the bulk of what Balatro has to offer. You will understand nearly all mechanics, you will have seen nearly everything within the game. You will uncover a few obviously meta-defining Joker cards and you will be left with very little that's _new_. In many ways this is fine, the gameplay loop is enjoyable. But the game is too easily uncovered too early, in a game designed for you to replay 1,000 times. It's not nearly as mechanically deep or as challenging as Slay the Spire, with its multitude of enemy types and different classes to play with. There's no sense of wonder and discovery as there is in a roguelite like Vampire Survivors. There is no resource management quite like Loop Hero, instead the resource management structure strongly resembles autobattlers like Teamfight Tactics. But unlike Teamfight, Balatro doesn't have an opponent to counterplay against, just your own luck of the draw and ability to manipulate drawpower. This, to me, is the bit where it all comes crashing down a little. Balatro has plenty of zany little things happening within it to help further your desire to keep running on the hamster wheel. New Joker card unlocks, new decks with triflingly little mechanical difference in starting specs, new tarot cards etc. But there really is just not that much happening after the first few games. The addictive 'one more run' feeling never really quite caught me, and the payoff of satisfaction after a successful run never felt like the same dopamine hit you'd get from a successful Vampire Survivors or Slay the Spire run. Balatro is an experience more akin to doing the Wordle. One fun little run a day or so and you put it away to play games you'd rather play for lots of hours. Is it's simplicity it's undoing? Maybe. Maybe starting with the poker premise artificially limits just how creative and deep and engaging the game can be. Beholden to at least the conceits of the standard five card stud model restricts Balatro to a specific set of outcomes. Maybe it's the fact that the game is set against a target score and not against an antagonistic opponent drawing from the same 52 card deck you are. With no counterplay you're sort of playing a warped version of blackjack+solitaire that sees you rifling through your deck for the right suits and runs without someone aside from you to interject very much. Sure cards can get debuffed for a variety of reasons but that's why the Joker cards exist, neither component actually create much in the way of counterplay but rather amounts to playing solitaire with some house rules. Perhaps its poker origins are then why this feels a lot more like it's up to chance than other roguelites. Sure in any deckbuilder (or card game in general for that matter) the trick in being good is minimizing the RNG as much as possible to enable your win condition. But in Balatro I feel RNG always carried more weight than it did in other like games. That's fine with me, on the whole. I'm not a hater of RNG mechanics, often RNG is what makes games fun. But Balatro's gameplay is so quickly uncovered that the whimsy never quite hooked me to make me play more. Which booster pack in the between turns shop is going to give me +1 to my 'flush' multiplier or +1 to my 'three of a kind' multiplier wasn't exactly enough on its own to bring out that 'one more run' I feeling. Balatro never managed to be a game I couldn't put down. It is still fun. It's clever. It's simple. It's engaging enough to be more than just a game of five card stud. But it's more of a game I'd rather play while waiting for dungeon queues to pop or ranked queues to pop in other games, than it is something I want to play for hours on its own. It's simplicity and ease of access and innovation in turning poker into a roguelite deckbuilder deserve the credit it gets in what's been a weak year for gaming. But I just don't see it as anything revolutionary or groundbreaking or genre-defining or even must play. It's the funnest game to play while taking a shit at work since the New York Times released Connections and I mean that with all the sincerity and backhandedness I can muster.