Honestly it’s a great game but I hate how they handled the balance. Some jonklers completely overshadow others, face cards are overtuned to shit and straights are a complete and utter joke in a game where flushes and even 5-of-a-kinds are easier to pull off.

It has the potential to be way better but it’s held back by braindead strategies where you just roll the shop hoping for the combo you want, only to drop whatever you were building towards because that one overpowered bottom-text showed up and it’s now become a face card run.

Boss blinds also don’t feel like they do enough to oppress “all in one basket” strategies, which makes every run extremely stale where you just put all of your power into one optimal strategy and just have that carry you well into endless. Bosses should punish you for playing too optimally, not for playing not optimally enough. Some blinds do have the potential to shut down a run but by that point you can just reroll.

Retrigs are probably the worst mechanic in the game, not only do they slow the pacing down to a crawl (there’s a reason everyone turns game speed up to 4x once they get one) but it turns some of the cards from nice bonuses into exponential monsters as their bonuses compound with each retrigger. I like the idea of retrigs but they absolutely should be reworked to do all your retrigs all at once. That would fix it compounding multipliers and where stacking retrigs makes each hand take like 20 seconds to complete. If you have 3 retrigs than it will roll your odds 4 times and then multiply card (and joker) bonuses by 4x. Still really powerful but not an absolute slog that breaks the scaling.

I heard great things about Balatro, but I had a feeling it would get boring really quick.