izigame.me

Well here's a spectacular game... this is one of those ones where I'd had very high expectations going into it, and somehow, it managed to exceed them... but then tripped and fell on its face. It got back up though. But still. Right on its face.
Balatro is a deckbuilder, but I immediately have to commend it for being a UNIQUE deckbuilder. My biggest frustration with the genre as a whole is, honestly, the mere existence of Slay the Spire, because every freaking developer in this genre just copies that. Over and over and over. But not this one! A very, very rare instance of someone daring to do something different with the genre, and it knocks it out of the park.
Specifically, it avoids some of the most boring elements of the genre. For one, no card destruction. Oh you CAN destroy cards... very very rarely. So, none of that bizarre obsession with smashing up early game cards instead of, you know, actually BUILDING the deck (seriously I never understood that obsession in this genre). You're always buying new things, and changing/upgrading things that are always there. Secondly, it does away with that map thing. Instead, each ante consists of 3 blinds, right in a row. Small one, big one, boss. You can see what each one is for that given ante, showing how many chips you need to pass each, and what the boss is. You also can see the skip rewards for the small and big one, which is another element of strategy and decision making. You dont NEED to do those types of blinds... if you choose to skip one instead, you get a "tag" reward, which can be all sorts of different things. But, this also means you wont get money or other things (such as upgrades to incremental Jokers) from that blind. So, that's an important decision to make.
The bosses in particular are a design element that I think is just spectacular. Each boss sets in place a special rule/effect for that round. It could be things like debuffing certain types of cards, forcing you to use a certain hand type over and over, or even draining your money. The really interesting thing about the bosses and what makes them so great in my opinion is that these are very well thought out designs... each boss is meant to counter certain strategies Going for a flush build? A boss that cancels a specific suit could knock you out, as could ones that cause face-down card draws. Stuff like that. It becomes important to be ready to pivot your build around during an ante if you see that the boss for it will counter your build, and that's definitely a tension-filled moment.
Also, you have an enormous amount of ways to construct decks (and many starting decks to choose from), and the cards are usually not static. Jokers, the core of your build, each individual one has 5 different states it can have. Playing cards, have LOTS of different states they can have. This means you have way more options and choices than it seems at first... and it seems at first like you have a ton, before you even get to unlocking stuff. Combine that with things like tarot cards (consumables), vouchers (passive items), or planet cards (upgrades specific hand types) and you've got a million ways to build.
...Until you get far enough, that is. The game makes a couple of really awful design decisions, the sort which pretty much everyone seems to just hate. The difficulty system, for instance. It's that blasted ladder thing AGAIN, the one concept copied from the rest of the genre, but here, it's *terrible*. The worst I've ever seen it (granted, I always dislike this concept, but still). The different rungs on the ladder are mostly very dull things (except for the one that adds Eternal Jokers), and the higher you go, the more the balance comes apart at the seams, and the less fun everything is. Get high enough and the game starts to feel like a slot machine... yeah, it's that bad. Secondly, the early game for any given run is atrocious. It wont seem so bad at the starting difficulty... but the moment you go up to the next stake, the stupid begins. At that point, Small Blinds stop giving money, at all. The first blind of a run is always a small one. If the skip tag that is offered for it is not IMMEDIATELY useful as the first of the run, well... restart. You're at an immediate disadvantage, every single time, if you dont. Tip, hold R to restart without using the menu. The restarts will get more and more frequent as you go up the ladder, as after awhile that first blind isnt the only thing that'll have you doing it. And at the same time, the difficulty ladder just isnt INTERESTING. Seriously the effects are both super irritating, and super boring. As I often do in my reviews, I'm gonna quote AVGN here: "What were they THINKING?!" I mean good grief I absolutely LOATHE both of these elements of the game. I've not found anything in the genre that irritates me more. And THAT is impressive. In a bad way.
But... that's okay. The rest of the game is so astonishingly good that it makes up for all of that, and hey, you dont *need* to play on the super high difficulties. Even for unlocks... if you want, you can just hit "unlock everything" in the options menu. So, you could do as many unlocks as you can, until you either hit a hard wall or just get irritated enough, and then pop that to get the rest, so you dont have to miss any of the content.
There's more to talk about really, but I can only put so much in here. Really, the game is superb. Even with its issues I just dont tire of it. If this looks even the tiniest bit interesting to you, just buy it. You wont regret it. Even if the higher difficulties make you want to throw your PC down the stairs.