Ball x Pit suckered me in for three hours in its demo, so I knew the whole game would be like giving sugar to a baby. And boy, was I ready to inhale the sugar that is Ball x Pit (which I shall just now refer to as Ball Pit, to make it easier). After nearly thirty hours, I finished the story, but this is the kind of game that once you pick up, you could lose the rest of your year, too.
The magic of Ball Pit is that its gameplay is a combination of some of the most successful archetypes for ‘just one more go.’ It’s a brick-breaking game, an auto-shooter, and a roguelike all in one. And there are some base-building elements, but put a pin in that for later, as it’s by far the least interesting part of the game.
When you begin the game, you have one character to pick from, but you will unlock more as you continue to play, and they’ll have their own unique abilities, as well as starting with a particular ‘special ball.’ Every character shoots basic balls, or as this game calls them, ‘baby balls.’ Which will do fine for small amounts of damage against the hordes of enemies that are coming to you from the top of the screen, but you’ll be looking for those special balls, ones that inflict fire damage, area-of-effect lighting, earth damage and more to help clear them faster.
If you look at a screenshot of Ball Pit, it can resemble a typical brick-breaking game. There’s a character at the bottom of the screen, balls are flying around, hitting the enemies approaching from the top of the screen, but in-motion, the game plays a lot closer to something like Vampire Survivors (which is its own level of sugar addiction). Although you can move your character left and right across the bottom of the screen, and sometimes you’ll need to do just that, you’re actually free to move freely about the whole vertical field. Get up in enemies’ faces, move between them to shoot balls at high-priority targets first and more. And although the game begins with the option for auto-fire off, if you turn that on and leave it on, as I did, you’ll feel more like you’re playing something of an auto-shooting, brick-breaking hybrid.
As you defeat enemies, they’ll drop XP that’ll level you up (for the run, your overall character level is different), and you’ll have a choice from a few other upgrades or balls to add to your weapon arsenal. Where you choose to invest each level-up, and what balls you decide to pick, is where the best builds that take you to the end of the level, and those that don’t will be separated. You can go heavy on direct damage balls that would be good for boss battles, but struggle to clear waves, and find yourself overrun quickly, or vice-versa, being able to defeat high-HP enemies.
You’ll also get the ability periodically to combine your balls, and learning what balls can combine into more powerful ones is also a massive part of Ball Pit. If you’re able to build a selection of balls that’ll all combine into more powerful versions, it also frees up space for you to keep adding more balls to your current run. Learning what they are will take either experimentation or some Googling, I’m sure, but if you think logically, they make sense. The ball that shoots a laser to the left of the screen and the one that shoots a laser to the right of the screen can combine to form one ball that shoots in four directions, for example.
Each of the game’s eight levels takes you through desert and snowy landscapes all the way to the void of space. Each takes about fifteen minutes to beat, assuming you reach the boss at the end; each of the boss fights feels unique and requires different types of player movement, but also seems weaker against different builds than others. My only disappointment with the levels and boss fights themselves was that the music never reached a level where I felt fully immersed, both visually and audibly, in the game. I think there’s some okay music in the game, but it also seems to be mixed weird in a way that would never give you that kick in the ass you want in this kind of game, especially once you hit a boss fight.
As a roguelike, you’ll also be losing a lot, which is okay – there are only eight levels, and I never felt annoyed at this game. It was always a quick transition for me to want to keep playing another run, and having the game on the Steam Deck also led to a terrible disruption in my sleep schedule. Between runs, the character you’re using will level up, grow stronger, and also unlock different types of buildings for you to buy and build at your base.
The base building in Ball Pit is unique, but it feels like a less thought-out part of the experience than the core ball-breaking runs. You have access to a field area, which you can expand with gold you earn on your runs, and then also build different types of things like buildings to unlock new characters, stuff that other stats boost, and also material farming areas for wheat, wood and iron to help you build more things. You can then send out the characters you’ve unlocked to bounce around the town, ala-Peggle style, to earn and develop. It’s fine. It’s a forgettable part of the game that you do to keep playing the core game and unlock and build up your stats, but no one is playing Ball Pit for the base-building part.
High score chasing is going to be a big part of the game, and mastering Ball Pit will probably have players choosing to turn off auto-shoot, or at least, mastering ‘catching’ their special balls before they hit the back wall, as it allows you to fire them off again straight away. But I’m also keen to see just how deep the game can go, as it does seem ripe for secrets. When you beat it, you unlock NG+, for example, but what’s after that? How deep does this hole go?
There are already fifteen characters in the game that you can unlock, and those include some that can really change up how the game is played: one just plays the game for you, another makes the balls shoot from the other side of the screen, and another even turns it into a turn-based game. I am keen to see more characters added and weird levels and expansions built on for Ball Pit in the future. Not to keep bringing it up, but I look at Vampire Survivors for the characters they keep adding, each with a new weapon. Let’s keep adding characters here, each with a new special ball. Let’s get some weird DLC collabs going.
(Review code provided to Explosion Network.
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