Balatro Review (Xbox Series X|S)

The only experience this particular writer has ever had with poker is reluctantly standing beside a nicotine-addled schoolfriend in a smoky 90s arcade while they mindlessly pumped all their pennies into what was surely the most boring game ever invented on planet earth. The end.

It stands to reason, then, that we fully expected to suffer terribly through reluctantly learning the various mechanics and rules of this casino classic before attaining the level of knowledge required to properly engage with Balatro - or indeed write a review of it that made a lick of sense. The genius of this game however is that, even for a complete and utter #PokerPlonker, it's an immediate and absolute joy to sit down with, and one that requires zero learning in advance. If you've been reading all the banging reviews that've dropped already this week and feel as though your lack of enthusiasm for poker/cards counts you out of the party, fear not, as we genuinely struggle to even count to 21 without a calculator and we're having the time of our lives.

Localthunk's wonderfully unique and evocative roguelike/deck builder nails the glitchy CRT vibe of those big old wooden-panelled poker machines we stood and watched for so many hours back in the day. The layout of your board (definitely not the correct terminology), the way the cards move around the screen, the little beeps and boops and graphical anomalies as circuit boards are fried by second-hand Silk Cut smoke, it's all present and correct here - albeit sieved through another dimension before reaching your eye and/or earholes.

Balatro takes the bones of poker (the desire to Google what the bones of poker are is overwhelming right now) and adds a whole bunch of cool collectible cards on top of your basic poker deck. As you play, the aim is to face-off against a succession of increasingly difficult dealers, here framed as boss battles, attempting to beat their chip score to move on to the next opponent. As you attempt a fresh run you'll kick off with a basic deck then start accruing cash via matches, enabling you to purchase collectible Jokers, tarots and various foil packs of very sexy special ability cards that power-up this base deck.

Starting your first round you'll find it hard, perhaps, to best even the lowest of what the game calls "big blinds". We're sure that 'big blind' is the sort of thing we've heard in the Ocean's Eleven franchise a whole bunch of times over the years, it definitely rings a bell, and so it's likely to be related to cards in some way - all we know is that saying it out loud makes us feel like Julia Roberts. Basically you need to hit the current dealer's set score in the allotted number of turns (or hands if you think you're Andy Garcia), and to do this we must struggle through our first match - a good way to learn what a pair or flush or straight is - and then we'll have enough cash to pick up some goodies from the shop you'll return to between rounds.

Maybe you'll choose to purchase a shiny Tarot card that raises the level and power of any pair, meaning whenever you play a pair (a pair is two of anything by the way, so sorry, it's like learning a new language) you'll get extra points and bonuses and multipliers and all that video game stuff. There's 150 Joker cards, some of them do bland things like give you a straight-up boost for a certain type of play, whilst others do crazy stuff that we won't spoil. All of these appear at random in the shop and they all look really cool, so you immediately want to nab them as they can be displayed in your in-game collection to look over later. The addiction, it already settles in.

Add to this all manner of one-time boon-applying vouchers, glass cards, stone cards, ghost decks, gold decks, spectral cards, cramp in both feet and so on...there's so much going on here, it's genuinely incredible that it remains so addictively freewheeling and simple to play.

In the end this fusion of regular old poker, the game's spaced-out vibe and a genuinely wild and wacky selection of special cards and cool ideas makes for a worryingly moreish mutant of a thing that we did not see coming, and one which has absolutely blindsided us. Having a fear of the many intricacies of poker, or indeed just finding it all terminally boring, is a very common affliction, one for which we reckon Balatro may very well be a new miracle cure.