I have a new, all-consuming obsession, and that obsession is Ball x Pit. I didn’t set out to replace all my free time with grinding its roguelite take on Breakout, but its reliance on strategy (with a butterfly kiss of luck) and enticing upgrade paths both on and off the playfield grabbed a hold of the primal lizard parts of my brain to the detriment of all other civilized activity. I am hooked. In fact, Ball x Pit is the only video game I’ve played since I first started it a couple weeks ago. I cannot break free from its satisfying loop of running a level and upgrading my balls, upgrading my city to unlock more balls, and then jumping right back in. It’s a sickness, a sickness with no cure – and, honestly… I’m not even sure I’d want to be healed from the madness that has taken hold of me. I’ve been recommending it to everyone and, so far, those who have taken my advice inevitably reach out to tell me the same thing: “You ruined my life, you sicko.” It’s fantastic. Join us. We all bounce down here.
At a distance, Ball x Pit looks like one of those crappy games you see advertised on TikTok or Reels. You know the ones: “We’re playing a game the comments said was fake part 17,” or something like that. At first blush, it does look like some endless runner game trying to hook you with playtime gems or whatever predatory garbage is in vogue these days. But, crucially, it’s not one of those games at all, as it’s entirely free of microtransactions and actually respects your time as it vacuums it all up. It doles out satisfying upgrades in each level and then gives you the opportunity to build up more permanent powers in your home base. There’s nothing cheap or underhanded about it. It makes you feel powerful, not cheated, and even with an element of RNG in each level, it requires you to make the most out of every opportunity rather than rely on dumb luck or random chance. When you beat a level, it feels like you earned it.
The actual gameplay seems straightforward on the surface, too: Your character, or characters, march up the playfield firing bouncing balls at wave after wave of enemies. The balls are weaponized, the enemies are crushed under the onslaught, and eventually you get to a given level’s unique boss. That’s the basic loop, but the operative word there is “basic.” Because, friends, Ball x Pit is much more complex. For starters, there are different kinds of balls to fire. For example, your initial character, the Warrior, starts with a special ball that imparts a “bleed” status effect that stacks up to cause extra damage on successive hits. As you defeat enemies, you’ll also pick up gems in order to level up, which then gives you a choice of balls and other power-ups to use during that specific run.
There are special balls with status effects or area-of-effect damage, balls that spawn more “baby balls” (weird), and loads of other options. Then there are buffs, passive effects, defensive boosts, and even allies who’ll join you in the march forward, dealing out damage or even health. Some of the power ups are much better than others. The Earthquake ball, for example, deals damage around the enemy it hits and, like most of the AOE balls, becomes incredibly powerful when fully upgraded. Others, like the Wretched Onion, kind of suck. Part of the fun is finding out which upgrades work best in any given level, as well as discovering what happens when you combine certain balls with Fusions and Evolutions that mix or modify their powers even further.
Fusions can simply save you a slot by mashing two effects onto a single ball, but specific combos instead get the chance to evolve into a new power. For example, fusing the Horizontal Laser with the Vertical Laser creates my personal favorite, the Holy Laser. It shoots beams of pure fiery death vertically and horizontally on hit while also dealing AOE damage, which is as useful much as it just rules.
It’s cool that fusing balls both scales the damage you are dealing and gives you room to add even more. It’s hard to keep track of all the possibilities, but there’s an in-game encyclopedia that shows you the combos you’ve unlocked. I’m more than 30 hours in and I still have fusions I haven’t found yet, which I find pretty damn exciting.
Honestly, the laser balls in any configuration do a crap-ton of damage, searing rows and columns, sometimes adding stackable status effects like radiation while also doing normal, hot laser damage. When you’re fully powered up and the RNG gods have held you in their favor, it’s a beautiful bloodbath. Lasers and explosions and effects are going off constantly, and the damage counters fill the screen as entire rows of enemies evaporate into experience gems, as well as gold you’ll spend back in your town between runs.
The town is the other half of Ball x Pit, one that’s enormously important to growing your characters. In addition to earning permanent stat boosts just by playing as them, constructing certain buildings and character houses will provide buffs and bonuses as well, which you’ll absolutely need in order to make it through the later levels. But while it’s very important, the city-building part of Ball x Pit is extremely clunky – in fact, it’s probably the worst part of what I think is otherwise a flawless game.
After you complete a level, whether or not you did so successfully, you’re thrown back into the town interface where you’ll build structures from blueprints you gathered out in the field. You also build resource tiles: forests for wood, fields for wheat, and rocks for… well, rocks. Those resources, in addition to gold, are required to build and upgrade new structures. Thankfully there are plenty of ways to gather resources outside of just harvesting, including during runs and with passive buildings like the stone quarry, but collecting it manually is the most fun.
In the harvest phase, you use your unlocked characters as balls, taking aim from the bottom of the board and letting them rip, Beyblade style, in the direction of the stuff you want to hit. They then bounce off the walls and buildings, collecting resources from the resource tiles and upgrading any buildings you marked for improvement. This process is amusing but also fairly tedious, as you can move buildings around before you harvest in order to optimize their placement, but there isn’t really a convenient way to do so.
What I usually end up doing is moving everything off to one side of the map, then shuffling all the parts and pieces back again to where I want them at that specific moment. It almost seems like Ball x Pit is aware of how cumbersome the city building is, because there’s no penalty or resource cost for moving tiles around. What I’d love to see is some kind of option to wipe the slate clean without needing to go through and manually remove every building, or maybe a holding pen where I could drop structures temporarily while I reconfigure my layout.
And you will be reconfiguring your layout a lot. Building upgrades require your characters to bounce off the buildings multiple times, and if that building is in a weird location, good luck getting the trajectory right to consistently hit it enough times during the harvest phase without reorganizing half the town. I often ended up moving relevant buildings down near the launch area, which meant moving all the other stuff away… and then reorganizing it again after all is said and done. I don’t like it at all.
It’s such a bummer because you can’t really ignore this, as city layout is extremely important to how powerful you are in the levels themselves. Some buildings provide buffs that make the effects of other nearby buildings stronger, so their placement is crucial to your continued success. That need for careful planning is at odds with the reality of constantly shuffling tiles around when it comes time to harvest, build, and upgrade.
However, building-specific issues aside, I do really like how your town structures contribute directly to the action itself. The better your city, the better your characters, and the more blueprints you find, the more options you have when it comes to a new run. It may be cumbersome to move everything around, but the results are meaningful and can sometimes be surprising in a way that is ultimately a positive.
Double Down on Strategy
Somewhat early on, you unlock a building that lets you bring two characters into battle instead of just one, adding another layer of complexity and experimentation to each run. At first, it almost feels like cheating, but it would be functionally impossible to get much further without it. I’m still figuring out which combinations work well and which ones are total crap. Since you still gain gold and experience even on a failed run, I don’t even mind when I pick a total dud combo because I’ve still made some progress. There have also been several times where I thought I’d figured out some god-tier combo, only to get three-quarters of the way through a level and realize I have made a terrible mistake.
The worst was when I paired The Warrior with The Flagellant for a New Game+ run of the first level. Balls shot by the Flagellant bounce off the bottom of the screen instead of the top, and The Warrior has no special attributes other than being your starting character. The first level boss, the Skeleton King, requires hits to the back of its skull to inflict damage. The RNG gods had graced me with some decent fusions, but all of them ended up bouncing harmlessly between his two arms out front, leaving me almost completely ineffective. An errant baby ball would sometimes bank off the wall to register a tiny amount of damage, but I ended up losing on purpose just to back out of the level.
As frustrating as that was, it’s emblematic of something I love about Ball x Pit: it requires strategy in almost every facet. The balls and upgrades offered to you are at the mercy of RNG, sure, but you also have the choice of which ones to use and which ones to fuse and evolve. I was able to identify good combinations and bad combinations of characters based on their attributes and would make mental notes about which pairings would work out for my specific needs as I pushed through each level. The Juggler, for example, throws balls over enemies – pairing him with The Shade, whose balls shoot from the back of the field, and then following a heavy AOE upgrade path allowed me to clear out basically any row of enemies on the board while still getting a ton of damage from balls bouncing in the back.
That combination of strategy and knowing how to best upgrade any given character combination for a specific level is what keeps bringing me back, over and over again, until I’m bleary eyed and tired. When everything aligns and you’re wiping out entire fields of enemies, when the screen is absolutely filled with lasers and explosions and baby balls scattering in every direction, you feel an enormous sense of power. From an outside view, honing in your upgrades combined with careful building placement and frequent stat leveling from buff buildings makes it seem like Ball x Pit would feel easier over time. But it does a rare thing: instead of feeling easy, it makes you feel powerful.
When I finally did beat the main story and watched the credits around the 20-hour mark, I immediately started up New Game+. I never do that. But the entirely inconsequential story is just a small part of Ball x Pit for me. The real joy here comes from building up your powers and combos and seeing what delights will unlock themselves during the course of a run. I play for moments when the music is nearly drowned out by the sounds of explosions and laser blasts, or when I get a gold bonus for clearing the field of enemies and then doing it two, three, even five more times in a given level. It scratches an itch deep within my lizard brain. Hard work pays off, but the right combinations of upgrades mixed in with a touch of luck pays off even more.
*:
