I love this game soooo much!!! I originally had it for steam and when I found out that they were making it for my phone I knew I was going to grab it. I love that it’s free to play the first deck and you can purchase the game after trying it. You will get addicted to the game and the other decks are 1000% percent worth it!

As a free game, it’s fun and addicting, and while you won’t win every time, you can win frequently enough to keep coming back for more. If you pay to unlock the all game modes, what you actually get is the opportunity to unlock the rest of the game modes. Unfortunately, most people will only actually get one additional game mode. After 30+ games, and looking at guides, I can confidently say that the only way to beat the 2nd mode is to get perfect RNG on the free tags in the first trip to the store, make no mistakes, and then earn enough $ and bones to get a chance to get the perfect supporting tags to complete the game. Most of the tags needed to build one of the winning strategies are rare — a few I’ve seen only once, and others I have never seen. So if you like frustrating RNG games, or you’d like to reward the devs for a good free game, then you probably won’t mind paying to “unlock” the game. If you want to try out all the other modes, then don’t bother unlocking, as you will probably delete the game long before you’ll ever unlock anything beyond one. Suggestion to the devs: how about starting these harder modes with a choice of strategies, where the choice would weight the RNG for certain synergistic tags, possible also granting one of the core tags for the strategy up front? This would allow for lots of variation of play and make winning more achievable without making it too easy.

Way too easy to get sucked into playing this for hours, even with only the free version. Nothing motivates you to play another game of dog balatro like almost-but-not-quite winning a game of dog balatro. Tactile gameplay, fun art style, and deceptively complex strategy options. One complaint is that, as another review noted, the "eyeball" button doesn't work, so you can't view your yard while in the shop. Also, the mechanics are 99.9% consistent, but occasionally a power-up will fail to trigger. Some dogtag descriptions could stand to be clarified, like the tennis ball that "rouses the hounds", and nearly half have so little effect as to be virtually useless. I also feel like endless mode ramps up the difficulty much too fast; the curve should be a bit more gradual. Finally, the game does seem to drain your battery pretty fast for what it is, so optimizations in that area would be nice.

Still really awesome and will definitely keep playing. But it might be a good idea to mention that there’s more content locked behind a paywall cause some people might be upset finding that out only after downloading