Balatro
BANGER · Roguelike · 2024
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $14.99.
- Length
- 7.7h
- Value
- $1.95/hr
- Reviews
- 98% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 1 GB of memory, OpenGL 2.1 compatible graphics card, integrated graphics, 154 MB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS.
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.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $11.99, set in February 2026. It has been discounted 22 times in the 3 years tracked here, typically at 10 percent off, with about 5 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 13 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
Value puts it in the top 1 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 62 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 99 percent. Among the games closest to it, 9 Kings ($19.99, scores 77) and Ratropolis ($17.99, scores 69) both come in lower.
The press gave it 90; the people who bought it give it 98 percent. An 8-point gap in the buyer's favour.
This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 10 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written January 2026 to September 2026. That is fewer refunded reviewers than 8 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 355 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 311 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 91 percent of the 6,444 reviews written there were positive, against 98 percent overall, and those are 4 percent of everything written about it.
HowLongToBeat players log 7.7 hours as a typical playtime, and completionists log 251, 33 times as much.
198,406 people have reviewed it, which is a big enough crowd to settle the number.
At 7.7 hours it is a handheld-sized game, and Valve rates it Deck Verified.
The drop-off
90% start to 16% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
Players
17.1K players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
After playing this game for a while I decided to hit up my local casino. It turns out that you can't bring cards made out of glass to a poker table, and you also can't bring a joker card and say your hand is multiplied by 1.5x. The owner of the casino called me a "crackhead" and said I could "never come back". I assume he's just new to the game of Poker so I'll just come back another day and tell him to check this...
This game has sucked 105.1 hours of my life DRY. I'm now a withering husk, Balatro will leave you a gasping, sweaty, dry, raging, dead, alive, happy, depressed pile of slop. You'll be BEGGING for the x-mult jokers too show up but they never do so you're just stuck there desperately trying to salvage what's left of your ruined run while the world crumbles around you at ante 5 and you're left a shell of the man you...
I would suggest Balatro to almost anyone. The game doesn't require any quick reactions or twitchy movement. It also can be stepped away from and you don't need to worry about having something go wrong. You can pop in for a quick game or pour in a couple of hours if you'd like. Balatro is easy to wrap your head around initially. Over time, you'll discover combos between cards, various strategies and really feel like...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Balatro scores 95/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/2379780/balatroThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 13, price as of Sep 23.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.