BALL x PIT Review – A Survival Roguelite with Massive Balls of Fury!

Barely Magic Mike
Oct 16
6 min read

BALLS TO THE WALL

Vampire Survivors and the hordes of indies that followed in its footsteps are the best example we may ever see of a video game genre being invented, then subsequently saturated to hell and back. The speed with which the survivors-like, bullet heaven, rooty tooty auto-shooty or whatever you want to call them games have flooded onto Steam by the tens and hundreds and maybe even thousands would be impressive if it wasn’t also kind of annoying – how many of these games do we truly need, and is it possible for a genre to reach its peak when it’s barely old enough to be potty-trained?

Ball Cross Pit… err… Ball X Pit… Ball Pit? I think it’s just Ball Pit… Ball X Pit is here to not exactly answer this question definitively, but to make a case that the Vampire Survivors formula can be more than just the same game presented in slightly different flavors. It takes the run progression and mechanical style of Vampire Survivors and throws it into the format of an aggressively fast brick-breaker where the balls you shoot have different properties that can massively change their impact. But does this genre mash-up do enough to mix up its inspirations? Let’s find out, and see how many immature jokes about balls we encounter along the way.

Ball X Pit’s story isn’t the least bit important, but what is important is that the city whose remains form its titular pit is called Ballbylon, and it’s really hard not to appreciate how stupid that is. In the aftermath of the fall of Ballbylon lays a massive, seemingly endless pit, attracting fortune seekers of all kinds to plunge into its depths and fight through a variety of biomes to get rich. That’s about it as far as the premise goes, and I’m not sure why you’d expect much more.

Each run of Ball X Pit will have you choosing one of a large variety of characters and a level to play, with each subsequent level after the starting area being unlockable by completing runs with a certain number of characters. While the levels do feel pretty similar, there are enough differences both visually and mechanically that it’s hard to fault those similarities much. Each biome has unique enemy types that take the form of bricks, and slowly begin scrolling down your screen in a bid to make it to the bottom, taking a heaping chunk out of your health bar if they do. Your goal is to make sure they never get that far, ball-banging them into oblivion before they get the chance, just like my last Grindr hookup.

The core gameplay works much like any other brick breaker, where shooting each ball directly at an enemy will damage them, but won’t get you far without strategically aiming it to bounce between as many enemies as possible. Ball X Pit isn’t shy about throwing tons and tons of foes your way and forcing you to get creative in dealing with them. But thankfully, you won’t need to rely on your shooting prowess alone.

While each character may have a perk like increasing your ball’s damage every time it bounces or even having two sets of balls that automatically shoot in opposing directions, every enemy killed will also drop experience crystals that should be rapidly gathered to earn yourself some new abilities and upgrades. Most of these come in the form of new balls to shoot like one that sets enemies on fire, another that moves slowly but packs a hell of a wallop, or my personal favorite, a ball that dishes out a laser beam to damage every single enemy in its applicable row or column. You can also pick up fusion reactors that work very similar to Vampire Survivors’ treasure chests, granting a random number of upgrades to your abilities or if you’re lucky, the option to evolve ones you already have or fuse two together. There are a ton of different builds possible here and the ability to combine powers is a pretty cool one, but I couldn’t help but be a tad disappointed at how quickly abilities max out. Each can only be upgraded a couple of times before it needs to be fused or evolved into something else.

This makes sense from the perspective of forcing you to rely on a ton of different abilities rather than any particular one, but it has an unusual side effect where each run has so many different balls with different abilities in play at once that no single one is totally game-changing. The potential for the ultimate roguelike fantasy of completely broken builds is there with some combination of strategy and luck, but it feels less satisfying than Vampire Survivors because runs here tend to feel a little samey. The core gameplay is incredibly fun, and I can’t say I ever really got bored, but that feeling of carefully choosing the right stuff to build out a crazy power fantasy wasn’t as realistic as I initially thought.

Whether you ultimately win or lose a run, you’ll visit your settlement afterward to harvest resources and work on Ball X Pit’s unique meta-progression minigame. This city-builder-esque element is the part of Ball X Pit that left me the most torn. Using money and resources collected both from prior rounds of the minigame and just playing through each run, you’ll place buildings and resources that will unlock new characters, scale up in-game stats, or just gather supplies to do more building. It’s surprisingly clever because it becomes up to you how to best progress the meta-game. While placing each wheat field, forest, or house, you’ll have to consider not only what’s surrounding it, but how to get it in a position that your unlocked characters can interact with.

That’s because one time in between each run, you’ll have a chance to aim your characters just like the balls in the pit in a singular direction on your settlement, at which point a clock will start and they’ll begin furiously bouncing their way through everything you’ve placed. You can build a house that unlocks a new character, for example, but it won’t actually be constructed until enough of your existing characters bounce off of it and complete the construction. Place a house you want built in an inaccessible area, and it may as well be a highway in New Jersey for how much construction gets started versus actually finished.

It's a cool system, no doubt, but where I struggle is the nagging feeling that meta-progression isn’t very efficient unless I do a lot of micromanaging and moving buildings around. Placing things in such a way that my characters predictably bounce off them is time-consuming and pretty tedious, making it not long at all before my willingness to put in the effort more or less evaporated. And I say this as somebody with a strong affinity for city builders. Here, unfortunately, while nothing was truly mandatory, getting the most out of the meta-progression meant spending a lot more time with it than I had any interest in doing. Your mileage with this part of the game is likely to vary greatly, but I’m thankful that none of it is too obnoxious about forcing me into its rhythm.

Ball X Pit’s presentation, as you should mostly be able to tell from the footage, is consistently good on pretty much all fronts. It’s colorful, flashy, and has plenty of visual variety between biomes, with the only real downside to its look being sometimes the screen can get so wild with effects that it can be hard to spot enemy attacks. It’s a pretty minor issue though, and one that never actively hindered a run. The soundtrack is awesome too, and one of the highlights to round out the whole experience.

Overall, despite some minor hiccups, Ball X Pit seems to learn most of the right lessons from Vampire Survivors while maintaining an identity distinctly its own. Its form of meta-progression may not be for everyone, and I wish runs had a little more variety, but this is a plenty worthy roguelite with lots of content to sink your teeth into, and most fans of either genre it’s taking on are bound to not leave disappointed. On our ratings scale that ranges from the unbearaball indie krampus all the way up to the unmissaball golden genie, Ball X Pit earns itself the mighty honoraball silver genie lamp of approval.

SILVER - GREAT

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