Gideon’s Perspective
Ball X Pit is a pretty creative rogue-lite that takes the old school concept of Break Out and puts an interesting spin on it. On the surface, it’s pretty simple, block shaped enemies descend from the top of the screen and you shoot balls to destroy them. What makes the game interesting is the array of special balls and upgrades you get and how you combine them. You have everything from fireballs, balls that shoot lasers, and balls that shoot other balls, if you can think of a ball, it’s probably here.
You can find a video version of this review on YouTube
Ball X Pit also boasts a variety of characters that drastically change how you play and a novel meta mini game that governs your progression. It’s certainly a unique game, but an odd one, and I don’t just mean that conceptually. It’s odd, because I’m not sure I actually have fun playing it, because at times, I don’t feel like I’m playing anything at all.
| Gideon’s Bias | Ball X Pit Information |
|---|---|
| Review Copy Used: No | Publisher: Devolver Digital |
| Hours Played: 15+ | Type: Full Game |
| Reviewed On: Xbox Series X | Platforms: PC, Xbox Series, PlayStation 5, Switch |
| Fan of Genre: Yes | Genre: Puzzle Rogue-lite |
| Mode Played: Variety | Price: $14.99 |
That’s Bollocks
Rogue-lite games really stand on two core pillars and fail if either of them are weak. The first is how often you get to make meaningful choices. The second is how replayable they are, a repetitive rogue-lite can’t sustain its own gameplay loop.
Ball X Pit certainly nails the former, the latter, I’m not so sure. You certainly do have plenty of meaningful choices to make. As you play a run, you level up which allows you choose between new balls, level up existing ones, or choose passive abilities. Every choice here is extremely impactful. Perhaps not individually, but in the context of an entire run, very much so. Because you also get to fuse balls together or combine two into a brand-new ball.
So maybe you combine a ball that shoots lasers with a frost ball and get freezing lasers. Perhaps you combine a ball that causes earthquakes, with a ghost ball that passes through enemies, causing quakes to ripple up the entire line. Maybe you get several balls to spawn little balls on impact and then grab an item that increases the damage those little balls deal. Like any rogue-lite, there is some crazy combos to be had.
This is further elevated by the variety of characters you can unlock. Each character changes the game and how those different balls interact, sometimes in drastic ways. One character for example, makes balls fire from the top of the screen instead of from you. That changes your relationship with the entire game and all of it’s upgrades.
Another character’s balls pass through enemies, regardless of what they are, another gets a shield to reflect balls back, and another lobs them like grenades. There is even one character that turns Ball X Pit into a turn-based game! This type of variety opens up all kinds of combo potential, boosting the games build variety tenfold.
If that wasn’t crazy enough, at some point you gain the ability to take in two characters at a time, combining their abilities. As you can imagine, that makes things even more crazy. Making all those choices is genuinely entertaining.
There are several stages, each with different enemies that changes the puzzle ever so slightly. One might have a shield at the front, another pushes nearby enemies along faster. They aren’t drastic differences, but they do enough that you feel it, and the boss fights are pretty great.
However, your power isn’t entirely dictated by what you do in a run. After each run, you have an interesting meta game to take part in. You can build a variety of buildings, be it ones that unlock new characters and mechanics, ones that generate resources and others that actually impact your stats. The catch is, you actually construct these buildings and gather these resources by firing all the characters you have unlocked, in a mini game where they run and bounce off of these buildings for a short time.
The mini game itself is neat. But I admit the novelty wore off pretty quickly, and the resource grind became frustrating and somewhat disconnected from the rest of the game. However, the decisions you make about what buildings to focus on does impact your play style. Focusing on a certain stat for example does make a tangible difference. Alternatively making it so your starter balls begin at a higher level also has a profound impact.
That said, the eventual end game of this progression is to make you so strong that you more or less obliterate the runs, no matter what you do. The thing is, I didn’t need to get to that point before fatigue really started to set in.
This is because, I can’t say I was actually having fun playing Ball X Pit, because for the most part, I never really felt like I was playing it at all. The sole exception being the turn-based character. What I mean is, sure I might be moving a dude around on the screen and aiming where I shoot, but it very quickly becomes apparent how little that matters. The upgrades get so crazy, that, while sure you might have to dodge a boss’s attack, it largely doesn’t matter what else you do.
You either have the damage per second to win, or you don’t. Half the time there is so much going on and the screen is so filled with balls and effects that you can’t reasonably tell what is happening anyway. It ends up feeling a bit like an idle game, and heck, one of the characters you unlock makes it an idle game that plays for you. But I was feeling like that long before I unlocked it.
Verdict
Ball X Pit is certainly a unique game and for a time I found it interesting, but if I’m being honest the urge I had to play it felt eerily similar to the urge I’ve had to play crappy mobile games. There is an incremental progression that can be addicting. But after the first few hours I can’t say that I was actually having fun with the game, because it felt like an idle game. I know there is an entire genre dedicated to that concept, but it certainly is not for me, and it’s not what I expected when I dove into it.
There is certainly strategy in Ball X Pit, and the different bosses will require you to plan ahead about how you build out your ball blasting action with your chosen character, But the strategy is all top down, once the action is in your hands, it’s like handing your little brother an unplugged controller and letting them pretend to play, except in this case, you’re the little brother. It’s your choices of upgrades and how you build out your town that matters, not what you do with them, and that just feels weird to me.
