Ball x Pit is what you get when you combine a ball-launching brick breaker game with roguelike elements and base-building. If it sounds ridiculous, that’s because it kind of is, but in the best ways.
From lead developer Kenny Sun, Ball x Pit was a game that caught my eye immediately during Steam Next Fest earlier this year, and it lived up to the hype and then some as one of the more unique twists on a tried and true genre that is worth every penny of its shockingly low price tag, and more.
You’ve gotta have balls
Break bricks with balls while dodging enemy attacks on a vertically scrolling battlefield, build your base, use more bouncing balls to farm materials, rinse and repeat. This is the simple, basic gist of the gameplay for Ball x Pit, but it’s utterly addictive and presented in a way that scratches a very specific itch for me, making it a must-play for anyone who enjoys any of these sorts of genres.
In my 20-plus hours with Ball x Pit during the review period, I would constantly find myself playing in small increments of anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour (either on my PC or on my Steam Deck with its perfect performance), and I somehow always found myself coming back to it soon after to keep the progression flowing.
There’s next to no narrative to speak of in Ball x Pit, so if you’re looking for a strong story or dialogue, it’s not here. But that’s fine, because the gameplay loop is what brings you back in for more every time. “Ballbylon has fallen,” the game’s description reads. “After a meteoric and completely unexpected event annihilated the great city, all that remains is an ominous, yawning pit. Treasure hunters from far and wide flock to the city’s tomb to seek their fortune, plumbing the depths in search of Ballbylon’s scattered riches. Few return.”
Using these unique characters and special balls to break enemy-shaped bricks in the pit below to help rebuild your growing city of New Ballbylon, you unlock new ability-based balls, playable heroes, and blueprints to build out your base as you complete successful runs on a variety of stages. Advancing up the screen and clearing out the brick-like enemies in front of you is your task, with a boss awaiting at each level’s end. Watching the screen fill up with balls as they bounce to and fro while chipping away at enemies is a delight that never gets old.
Combining balls to evolve them into something new entirely is a blast, like taking one that causes bleed damage and fusing it with one that spawns baby balls, creating a Leech that attaches to enemies and saps them for HP. Using and discovering different combos is a good amount of fun as you focus on progressing through the pit’s various environments.
There are 15 playable characters who come with different abilities and starting balls, and a few dozen different combinations you can create by fusing and evolving balls together, so each run feels unique depending on what upgrades you choose and who you play with. It never really gets too mundane, and if it does, there’s a late-game character who quite literally plays the game for you if you want to play passively as you do something else.
Building something special
Outside of the addictive ball-bouncing and brick-breaking in the pit, your home base grows over the course of the game with new buildings and structures that supply buffs to base gameplay or resource farming, along with housing all of your characters.
Each run in the pit takes anywhere from 12 to 15 minutes, at which point you then return to New Ballbylon to focus on upgrades and resource-farming before heading back in for some more ballsplosions and boss fights with different character and ball combinations.
Filling out New Ballbylon with wheat, trees, and rocks to farm for materials to continue building and progressing is done by launching your playable characters into the city itself, bouncing off everything in a satisfying fashion along the way. Fitting buildings next to farming areas that maximize your resources feels a bit like a puzzle minigame, and there’s a lot of swapping and rotating to be done to make sure you get as much as you can so you can afford upgrades.
There’s a dedicated endpoint to Ball x Pit, and it came rather suddenly for me and thrust me into New Game Plus before I was able to finish out a few achievements, and that was quite annoying. But it’s one of the very few faults in a game that should easily supply a couple dozen hours of enjoyment for completionists.
I also do wish there was a bit more of a challenge to the game, as there’s a base difficulty level and then NG+, but by the end of my hours with Ball x Pit, I felt pretty overpowered with all of the upgrades I had acquired. This did little to take away my overall enjoyment, however, and I’ll remember the game fondly long after, especially since it’s somehow just $15. I think an argument could be made that it’s easily worth double that in today’s environment.
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The post Ball x Pit review – The most fun I’ve ever had with balls appeared first on Destructoid.
