It’s kind of crazy how quickly Balatro became the go-to inspiration for a specific subset of indie games. As I noted just a few weeks ago when writing about CloverPit, there’s no shortage of games that can be described as “Balatro, but with a board game/game of chance/card game.” I know that the same could be said for the preponderance of, say, Souls-like games, but in that case it took about a decade for those to take over. Balatro came out a little over 18 months ago, and it feels like new deckbuilding roguelike imitators come out at least once a week.
Mind you, sometimes those imitators are good, like in the case of Roulette Hero, so it’s not the worst trend in the world.
Of course, that leads to the obvious question: what makes Roulette Hero better than the legions of other deckbuilding roguelikes constantly arriving on Steam? After all, to go back to the review mentioned above, CloverPit was awfully similar to this – the difference being that was slots, this is roulette – and I didn’t exactly love that game.
The answer is that, for a game of chance, Roulette Hero gives you a surprising amount of control over the outcome of your spins. You may not be able to manipulate where a pull of the handle will lead, but the game makes it so that you can leverage your spaces for maximum damage against a parade of enemies. You can do so by swapping in new tiles, combining tiles to make them more powerful, even figuring out how you want to balance your tiles for the best effects. It makes the game feel like there’s a rather large element of strategy, which isn’t something you can often say about a game of chance.
It also helps that Roulette Hero is awfully cute. You’re filling up your board with pretty adorable animals on behalf of an equally adorable robot, and you’d have to be hard-hearted not to get sucked into the game’s brightly coloured world.
Unless, of course, you’re just sick of deckbuilding roguelikes – and I fully get it if you are. But if you have room in your heart and your hard drive for just one more, then you may want to give Roulette Hero a shot.
Spiral Up Games provided us with a Roulette Hero PC code for review purposes.
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