Balatro does Blackjack, but Without any of the Strategy or Cleverness
It’s been fascinating to watch the aftershocks of Balatro. Of all the successful games released in the past two years, it’s the game that indie developers point to and go “yep, we can borrow that”. Balatro’s jokers, in particular, are simple to replicate in lower-budget games.
There have been a wave of games that I hesitate to call copycats, as they have their own strong ideas. But they’re very much disciples of the church of Balatro. And like every influential game, there are the good disciples and the bad disciples. The good disciples riff on the original idea to create something new. The bad disciples copy rather than fully understand what made the original great. They add nothing and mostly take.
We’ve been thankfully light on the bad disciples. But you can probably guess why I am heading this way in the review. JokerJack is a bad disciple. It is, unfortunately, a lesson in how not to stand on the shoulder of a giant.
Balatrojack
JokerJack’s big idea is to focus on Blackjack (aka Twenty-One) instead of Poker. You can see the logic. Outside of Snap, Solitaire and Poker, Blackjack is probably the simplest yet most popular card game to adapt. A vast proportion of card-game players know how to play: draw cards in an effort to get as close to 21 as possible, while also ensuring you beat the dealer. Reach a total larger than 21 and you’re bust.
In principle, it’s a solid base for a Balatro-a-like. You only have to look at games like Dice A Million, Birdigo and Dogpile to see that a simple, communicable core is all you need to start making an engaging game. But every decision that JokerJack makes from this point onwards is the wrong one.
Boot up JokerJack and the first thing that whacks you in the face is that it doesn’t just borrow from Balatro, it ransacks it. Everything from the audio to the swirly Game Over screen is taken wholesale. All of the naming terminology is the same, from Jokers to Vouchers to Decks and Stakes. Even Chips, Mult and Multi are taken from Balatro, even though I’ve always thought Balatro’s naming terminology was a bit confusing in that area. Even when JokerJack could have improved on something, it doesn’t bother.
So much is stolen that you wonder whether lawyers will get involved. Nintendo’s lawyers would have been all over it. Actually, JokerJack has an odd fascination with Uno, and adds Uno cards in as effects, and I know full well that Mattel likes to protect that golden egg.
Where We’re Going, we Don’t Need Tutorials
The second thing that you will notice is that JokerJack doesn’t spend a single moment or paragraph on onboarding the player. There are no tutorials, no prompts, and barely a sentence on why you failed on a run. It is an overwhelmingly unfriendly game to play in the opening thirty minutes.
You could point to Blackjack as a game and say that it’s simple. It doesn’t need much introduction. But that turns out to be untrue. Even without any jokers applied to a run, JokerJack has an askew take on Blackjack.
There are effectively three ways to fail in JokerJack, for example, but it doesn’t tell you that. First, you need to beat the dealer. If you don’t get higher than the dealer’s score, then you don’t win the ‘stake’ that you initially played on the round. That leaves you with less money for the shop, and less money for the next round’s stake.
The second way to fail is by neglecting to meet the points’ threshold. You could beat the dealer, thinking that you’ve aced the round, only to fail to meet the points requirement. This is where the jokers come in: you need to be multiplying your score constantly, through Chips, Mult and Multi, to get scores that satisfy the game.
The third is you can simply out-spend yourself. JokerJack doesn’t stop you from spending so much in the shop that you can’t afford the next round. If you don’t pay enough attention, you could commit Blackjack hara-kiri.
You Will Die, Over and Over Again
Three ways to fail, it turns out, is too many. I must have played hundreds of matches of JokerJack, and most have ended in the first couple of rounds. You’re not getting invested in a run like Cloverpit or Balatro. You are playing runs at speed and dying most of the time. If you succeed, it may well be through luck rather than judgment.
There’s no ‘git gud’ to this, either. There aren’t enough levers to pull to make a better build. You have only three joker slots (I’m not sure why JokerJack limits the player to this extent), and the jokers were made for Balatro, not JokerJack. They assume that you have control of your deck, making copies of cards and thinning the cards you don’t want. Joker effects apply on pairs, odd cards, even cards and other specificities. But you don’t have that level of control over your deck. There are virtually no cards that help you determine the cards you’re dealt.
So, you might have a joker that gives you a healthy mult hike if you draw an ace, but Lady Luck is the only one who can hand you that ace. There is the ability to swap cards (never tutorialised, of course, so easy to miss), but you get a limited number of these swaps, and there’s no indication of what replenishes them (or how many you have left). You are largely stuck with the cards you’ve got.
I could produce a long essay on why JokerJack’s design doesn’t work, and how the unlocks are great but made for a completely different game entirely. Because spending money nobbles you. If you spend money, then you can’t put a large stake on the next match. And if you don’t put a large stake on the next match, then there is a good chance that you will fail, even if you beat the dealer’s score. You just won’t have a points total that meets the threshold.
The House, Unfortunately, Never Loses
Which hits on the central reason why JokerJack is a befuddling, unsatisfying game to play. Even when you do the most amazing, lucky thing, like beating the dealer with five cards that total 21 (and the dealer has 20), you may very well lose. Because you weren’t given that ace that triggered the joker you bought. Your run is over. It is entirely possible for there to be no single combination of cards that could save your run, yet you are only on round three.
I could talk about the different decks with different rules (some generating more interest, some fiddling with the required stakes), or I could talk about the chips that increase difficulty for each deck once you master them. There are the bosses, the vouchers and the consumables (but oddly no booster packs, which would have allowed a way out of some terrible joker luck). But it would be somewhat pointless. Most of the time, you don’t reach them. If you do reach them, it’s because you lucked into a joker combo that makes them moot. And there’s every chance that the next round will kill you anyway, simply because the dealer didn’t hit you with an ace, or they got lucky with a string of 21s.
I haven’t even mentioned that the achievements are all broken, and the various hologram and gold effects that you can place on cards make them impossible to read. Genuinely, you can’t see the number on the card you’re given.
I wonder if there is a successful Balatro-ification of Blackjack waiting to be made. It would have to deal with the hefty reliance on luck, and the possibility that the dealer will simply outscore you. But Cloverpit managed to do it with one-armed bandits, and that was even more RNG-reliant. I have belief. Someone could make it.
But JokerJack ain’t it. It doesn’t even engage with the luck aspect of Blackjack, and tries to bulldoze over it with jokers copied from Balatro. The result is a derivative, barely functional copycat that doesn’t deign to tutorialise itself. When every tenth game is inspired by Balatro, JokerJack needed to be so, so much more than whatever this is.
Important Links
JokerJack Hits Xbox – Blackjack Gets Twisted Into Something Much Bigger – https://www.thexboxhub.com/jokerjack-hits-xbox-blackjack-gets-twisted-into-something-much-bigger/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/jokerjack/9N8JS2745L8M/0010
