Review: Ballionaire is a satisfying experience ‘The numbers add up’

We’re seeing all sorts of unique roguelikes entering the gaming space and Balloon is one of the more unusual. A game like Pachinko, each turn puts you on a new board to conquer. Your goal? Accumulate as many points as possible. How interesting! However, its level of fun varied greatly as we were chasing the whims of the RNG, hoping for lucky hits to get us through.

IN BalloonYou will see a field ready to fill in the pins. When you release balls and bounce off them, you will activate effects and increase your score. The plateaus you need to clear will increase as you drop more balls, and you’ll get more pins to fill the field with each drop. The key is to try to place them strategically, where they will bring the most benefit, to maintain targets of meeting and mastering each area. Along the way, you will collect things like relics to passively help. Of course, there will also be Tribulations that gradually hurt and make things more difficult.

I’ll be brutally honest here and admit that my first three to five hours Balloon Running is not all they can do. It’s all my fault too. You are given pegs! You really don’t know how they might behave or interact without real-life experiments! You need to get a feel for the board and see the bounce and path! It’s OK. Newobject has designed the game in such a way that even if you play sub-optimally, everything makes you happy. The numbers keep growing, even exponentially if you don’t create smart groups, which is interesting.

After a few runs, Balloon will click. Believe me. Even if you don’t make the best choices, it’s still fun. You will always have three options for placing a new bolt, keeping you from being cornered. The UI is clear and descriptive, so you can see what happens when it’s placed, what passives appear, what happens when the item drops, and the likely conditions destroy them. It feels like there’s no penalty for trying things. You are encouraged to do your best and try things out.

I feel like the presentation also helped with that. Balloon is a bright poppy game. Everything is colorful and flashy. It really catches your attention when the balls start falling, so you pay attention to the interactions and see when something special is triggered to give you bonuses.

As you’d expect from a game with RNG, the only thing I can’t love Balloon What’s more is that it is a roguelike game with a lot of opportunities. While Balatro is another game where the luck of the draw can determine how far you will go, I find that there is more control there than here. In fact, it can be very easy for one Balloon Running to the end through no fault of your own, even though you did everything right, is a disappointment.

That also means while Balatro is a game that I feel like I could sit and play for hours, Balloon feels like a one-and-done situation. You take a chance, see how far you get, and come back in a few hours or days. This is not a bad thing! It’s just luck-based gameplay, combined with random Final Challenges that can passively make things harder, hindering repeat runs. Since we don’t have as much control over the game, sometimes other variables can really get in the way. It doesn’t even look like it Peggle or Peglin, where we really feel like we’re more involved in what happens when the Pachinko parts come out.

Balloon It’s up to chance, which means the degree to which you enjoy it radically changes from one run to the next. It’s an engaging game, for sure. There’s a lot of replay value here. It just doesn’t offer the same level of control as some roguelikes due to it drawing too much from Pachinko and Pegglewhich means it’s very easy for RNG to completely ruin your day.

Balloon available on Steam.

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