REVIEW: ‘Balatro’ Is A Dopamine Trip (Switch)

On the surface, Balatro, developed by solo-dev LocalThunk and published by Playstack, is a deck-builder roguelite built on the foundation of poker. On a deeper level, Balatro is an elegant game of luck-fueled optimization to chase the dragon of playing hands and scoring high. It achieves the near-impossible: to be easily understood enough to be effortlessly picked up while supporting the depth to justify sinking hundreds of hours into it.

Runs in Balatro start with picking your deck. Most decks come with your standard fifty-two cards and a modifier, like getting extra money to spend in stores or certain items appearing more frequently in shops. With that in hand, players must complete eight rounds to win a run, each comprising three levels.

Each level has an increasing point (chips) goal to hit with the third serving as a boss round with a special modifier like forcing you always to play five card hands or discarding two cards when you play a hand. You play poker hands (plus some extra ones) to accumulate chips and a multiplier, but you have a limited number of hands and discards to do so.

Between levels, players stop off in shops where they can spend their hard-earned money to purchase card packs that modify their deck, power-ups called vouchers, and joker cards. There are 15o jokers in Balatro and each one has a unique effect that modifies how a player’s hands are scored. Some increase the number of chips gained by cards of a single suit. Others multiply the multiplication of your chips as long as you meet certain criteria. Others help you make money faster.

Making the most of the randomized shops is the crux Balatro‘s addictive gameplay loop. The jokers all have multiple ways to synergize with one another, with some incredibly powerful combinations being possible. Getting a line of jokers that all work together well is extremely satisfying, especially after a few runs that ended before they could get running.

Variety is the spice of life in Playstack’s Balatro.

On top of selecting jokers, players also tailor their decks in a few different ways. Firstly, there is changing the selection of cards in your deck. You can change their suit, turn one into another, or even take them out entirely.

Then there are effects like turning a card steel so that it adds a one-and-a-half times multiplier to the player’s multiplier when it is held in hand, gold to pay out some cash when it is held in the player’s hand, or glass to double the player’s multiplier when the card is played at the risk of the card breaking.

And that isn’t even touching on seals that can be put on cards or the modifiers that can be placed on cards or jokers alike. It is a lot to keep track of, especially once the order of jokers in and the cards that you played matters as well. It forms an upper crust of complicated strategy, synergies, and engines on top of such a simple foundation of playing poker hands from what often starts as a standard deck of cards.

That complicated upper crust opens up the doors for countless permutations of runs and strategies. It is almost baffling just how deep the Balatro hole goes. And learning Balatro‘s rules and exploring its depths is unbelievably rewarding and addicting. Getting your first hand that scores more than a million points feels amazing. Then so does hitting a hundred million. Then you get to the point where the scoring has to switch to e-notation, and it’s like firework of dopamine going off in your head.

And that is when the genius of Balatro is laid bare. It’s 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.

Balatro is available now on Android, iOS, PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.