Balatro Reviews
Check out Balatro Review Scores from trusted Critics below. With 20 reviews on CriticDB, Balatro has a score of:
Monkey sees numbers go up, monkey happy. That’s Balatro in a nutshell. It has an incredibly addictive gameplay loop that manages to activate the same neurons that predatory gambling games and mobile trash love to prey on. The thing is, there’s nothing remotely predatory about Balatro. It’s just a rogue-lite card game with absolutely no stakes. Well, except for the sleep you might lose by playing it well past bedtime.
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Balatro’s genius is exposed when you take the simple individual components of a run and combine them in the perfect mixture to create something far greater than the sum of its parts. And then you start trying to see how far you can push it, or what other combinations can help you reach e-notation. And then you’re there. You’re a Balatro fan.
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Balatro's ingenious combination of poker and roguelite gameplay creates an intoxicating combination that's hard to pull away from.
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The poker roguelike. Balatro is a hypnotically satisfying deckbuilder where you play illegal poker hands, discover game-changing jokers, and trigger adrenaline-pumping, outrageous combos. Switch version reviewed.
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I never would have expected that a roguelike could work so well in a card game before I played Balatro. It’s simple and guides you in so well, but escalates quickly and is happy to crush your run at any moment with the smallest strokes of misfortune. That’s what makes the variety of jokers and bonus cards so fun to explore. Every new option provides an opportunity to buck the house advantage. It leads to an appealing gameplay loop that kept me wanting to try all sorts of new angles and strategies. Balatro is something far out of the ordinary...
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Balatro is the clever marriage of card deck building and poker from developer Localthunk. Obviously, poker has the allure of high stakes strategy, luck, and competition and deck building has a similar draw that lasts past a current hand.
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It will be very difficult to find a game I have enjoyed exploring more than Balatro this year. Learning its mechanics were like learning a new language and it was all-encompassing. Balatro should be the design template going forward for many designers, it contains 0% fat and is trimmed to perfection. Not a pixel or mechanic is wasted in this immensely addictive roguelike. Bravo to all involved.
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Balatro is a roguelike for gamers who don't like roguelikes... and then everybody else on top of that. It utterly nails what it sets out to do, providing an instantly accessible, satisfying, and addictive gameplay loop that anybody can grasp. It's an immensely enjoyable experience from the start, but as you get deeper in, there's really nothing else quite like it. We suspect we'll be hearing a lot about Balatro when conversations steer towards Game of the Year, because this is a clear and obvious frontrunner. Utterly sublime.
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I’m not a poker player. I’ve never learned the game, and my limited knowledge of it largely stems from pop culture osmosis, such as James Bond films and referential quips from X-Men’s Gambit. I couldn’t tell you what makes a Royal Flush, but I know it’s good to have it. Despite its premise and appearance, Balatro technically isn’t poker. It is, however, the first title to make me understand and enjoy the core premise of the card game. It also happens to be one of the most engrossing games of the year.
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Balatro is an incredibly clever indie gem that uses the bones of regular poker to build an incredibly approachable and fiendishly addictive new experience. There's a wonderfully slick core to this one, building decks and taking on dealers as you add wild special cards and variables to your pack is trance-inducing stuff and, backed by a fantastically understated soundtrack and perfect visuals, it makes for one of the first proper, actual, absolute must-play games of 2024.
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I had never heard of Balatro prior to its release. From out of nowhere, I was looking at a minuscule indie based on a mere deck of cards getting scores as high as the ones earned by Baldur’s Gate 3 and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. That looked very odd, but also equally enticing. This obscure title could have either been a magnificent hidden gem or an ungodly overrated token indie which would have been fun to write about. I would have had fun with it regardless of the results. ...
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Balatro is an incredible roguelike with a unique poker theme that helps it shine above its competitors, especially on Steam Deck.
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Beyond those effects, though, it’s all about the complexity and randomness of bonus cards, the myriad shop items, the lucky joker pulls, these random prompts which can spin the most compromised run into gold. There’s a convenient seed system where players can challenge randomness, repeating their attempts with different choices (but without the opportunity to unlock achievements, of course). The path to success almost always seems within reach, with sufficient visibility in the design and interface that helps players make smart choices, once they’ve better learned what those are. The setup plays nicely with controllers and on the Steam Deck...
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Wielding nothing more than a deck of cards and a poker-themed twist on proceedings, developer LocalThunk has conjured something incredible and awe-inspiring with Balatro. What starts as a relatively-novel twist on the deckbuilding format quickly blossoms into an experience that's equal parts methodical, experimental, chaotic but satisfying all the same. A game that rewards clever thinking, mathematical meddling and having the courage to be just that bit braver in uncovering just how far one can push its systems at play. Wherein success and failure alike stand as equally memorable moments to build off. A paradigm for what roguelikes and deckbuilders...
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To put it in terms as simple as the game itself, Balatro is the best deckbuilding roguelike I've played. And I've played as many as there are cards in a deck (almost).
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Accompanying all of this is a gorgeous art style. It’s not pushing any boundaries, and I could see this game running on a ten-year-old phone with little issue. Still, it looks and sounds great. There isn’t a wide variety of music in Balatro. Thankfully the main song is relaxing and catchy enough that even after dozens of hours of listening to it I was never bored.
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No two games of Balatro are ever the same, which is only one of the reasons why we love this poker roguelike so much. Sure, it’s annoying if your run doesn’t get off the ground — it’s easy to fail early on if you can’t get your hands on a good Joker. But when you’re in the swing of things, scoring tens of thousands with just one hand, you’ll feel like the most powerful card baron there ever was. Simple and devious, Balatro is, quite frankly, brilliant — and I’m going to be playing this for months to come.
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This poker-themed roguelike deckbuilder revels in the thrill of cheating.
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A clever roguelike card game about cheating your way to victory, Balatro is a generous and mesmeric take on poker with endless strategic possibilities.
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