DAR Games Review: Ball x Pit. Brick Breaking Meets Roguelike City…

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Ball x Pit was a game I covered at Vice, previewing it well before release. And just off of the demo, I knew it had everything it needed to be a great experience. After some time with the full version of the game, I’m happy to say that it’s everything I thought it would be.

Ball x Pit is a roguelike brick-breaking game, and even that feels like an oversimplification. With some light city-building elements, it looks to fulfill the promise that its incredibly silly (complementary) opening cutscene provides.

There are some narrative elements to the game: a strange object has crashed into the city of Ballbylon and formed a massive crater. Adventurers begin to explore it, and that’s essentially your reasoning for getting in there. Devolver Digital has a reputation for finding the wildest concepts and helping devs bring them forward, and this game is no exception.

Gameplay

The concept is simple; if you’ve played any brick-breaking games in the past, you’ll be mostly right at home. You’re also probably old, and your back hurts like hell. But Ball x Pit is also much deeper than that. You’re placed in a narrow tunnel, with a mass of stone-like enemies bearing down on you slowly. Your only weapons are various types of balls fired up that bounce back to you.

The game offers an autofire function that slows your movement. I prefer the ability to fire the shots myself for the added movement speed, but you can get by pretty well with either one. Killing enemies gets you XP gems used to level up; if you’ve played Vampire Survivors, you know the business.

The power-ups are almost all useful, and the ones I didn’t really care for, like the stone soldiers that you can spawn to block an enemy, feel like I just need to adjust what I’m doing to understand the benefit. Once you get far enough down the tunnel, it widens up to prepare for a boss, and things get even more frantic. The gameplay loop remains engaging all the way through, though, and the various upgrades provide more than enough strategy to make every run eventful.

Life on the Outside

Once a run is over, you’re back on the outside, tasked with rebuilding Ballbylon. The resources you can pick up during runs are of use here in building the town. You start off with an empty plot of land, and from there you can build and expand the city. This will also grant you access to buildings that unlock new characters to go on runs with that have their own unique skill sets.

When you’ve set up certain areas like a forest or wheat fields, you can send your characters into the city to harvest resources. There is a timer on this, and you shoot them off into the city the same way you do the balls in the pit. Once the timer is up and they’re done, you get whatever they touched. It’s a pretty cool way to engage you in the city-building aspects of the game so you can maximize what you get back.

Final Thoughts

Ball x Pit is dropping in the middle of one of the best years for indie games, and it more than holds its own. I was dead in the middle of playing Hades II when I sat down with this, and not once did I think about going back to it. It’s the type of game that can supplement your time with other games or completely take over your life. The result is totally up to your level of discipline. And right now, I’m trying to pull myself away from it.

Score: 9/10

Ball x Pit is out now on PlayStation consoles, Xbox Series S/X, Nintendo Switch, and PC. A code was provided by the publisher for review. Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.