Ball X Pit review

There are certain games where you can tell immediately that they're going to ruin your life for a week. Five minutes into Ball X Pit, I knew I was in danger.

In fact, you'll probably be able to tell whether you're susceptible to the game's charms just from the trailer. Does Breakout-inspired gameplay tickle a nodule in the back of your brain? Do you find yourself inching closer to the screen, hypnotised by the bouncing balls? Does the phrase "city building subsystem" get your pulse racing? You might need to carve out some time.

The core formula is devilishly cyclical. During a run, you fire bouncing balls to break ever-descending enemy blocks. A Vampire Survivors-inspired progression system lets you gather experience orbs from fallen enemies and build up an arsenal of balls (each with their own unique powers, from chain lightning to poison) and items granting passive bonuses.

Beat the final boss of a stage (or die trying) and you'll return to your settlement. Here, you can fire balls (technically your roster of unlocked heroes) at your own stuff—because everything from gathering crops to cutting down trees to constructing new buildings requires a bounce. Those buildings unlock new characters, bonuses, and options for your runs.

Who could resist going on one more run to try out those new toys? But then that run has earned you a ton of gold and a new blueprint, so it makes sense to build something else before you log off. And once it's built, you can't not test out that bonus, right? You can start to see why this is a ride that's difficult to disembark from.

In fact, the effectiveness of that loop is probably disproportionate to how much depth Ball X Pit really has. Though there's build-crafting to be done during runs—with the most fun coming from the ways you can fuse balls together to combine their powers or evolve them into new forms—it's never particularly complex, and the actual ball-bouncing is straightforward. There's little opportunity for trick-shots or other clever strategy beyond the basics, and while you can perfectly tune the layout of your town for maximised harvests and synergies between buildings, there's very little pressure to.

Ball X Pit instead goes for a kind of joyful excess. New characters offer increasingly bizarre and game-changing quirks, from reversing the flow of gravity to making the game turn-based. Certain buildings radically alter the progression system in ways so unexpected I'm loathe to spoil them—other than to say that builds that at first seem just out of reach soon become your bread-and-butter as you ascend to ludicrously overpowered heights.

That excess can definitely feel… messy. The various characters are not remotely balanced against each other, for example, and some are a lot more fun than others. (The Cogitator, whose only power is that he chooses all his level up picks automatically instead of letting you make the build, may go down as my least favourite roguelike character ever.)

But that lack of restraint also means you're just constantly unlocking things that feel borderline illegal. Any time you might be starting to feel a little worn out, the game will throw some ridiculous new thing at you that warps the game into a weird new shape, and you'll be desperate to dive back in again.

It makes Ball X Pit an absolute blast for as long as those unlocks last—and in my case, that was about 20 hours, though that may have been bloated a little by my inefficient town planning. Past that, the truly ball-pilled can work their way through a pretty extensive New Game+ mode that could easily last another 20 if not more, though I think I'm probably ready to retire for now.

Not quite the longevity you might have come to expect from the genre, then, but for a week it was all I thought about, and I feel very satisfied with the rollercoaster ride Ball X Pit sent me on. One of my favourite things in roguelikes is when they create a very clear set of rules, and then gleefully invite you to break them. This is a game that takes that philosophy to the extreme, and it's a blast discovering quite how far it's willing to go to keep you bouncing balls off blocks for just one more run.