Ball X Pit is an ingenious mix of Vampire Survivors, Tetris and Breakout. Descending into the titular pit, you pick a character, shoot balls at waves of encroaching enemies, fuse your balls (in a good way, not in the medical emergency way) and return to the surface to upgrade your village.
Boiled down, it’s a simple but extremely addictive loop. Enemies drop gems when killed, which allow you to level up. When you level up, you can pick from a handful of special balls or items that provide passive benefits. For example, the Earthquake ball deals AoE damage wherever you aim it, the Poison ball does damage over time, and the Ghost ball passes through enemies.
Where things get more complicated is with fusion and evolution system. Occasionally enemies will drop a special item that allows you to pick fission, fusion, or evolution depending on which balls you have in your arsenal. Fission simply upgrades a random number of your current items. Fusion combines any two balls, mixing together their effects and freeing up a slot. Evolution, however, creates a brand new, super powerful ball by combining two others.
Combining the vertical laser with the horizontal one creates the Holy Laser, which shoots in all four cardinal directions, wreaking havoc on your foes. Discovering new evolutions, and catering the combinations to your chosen character and level, is an absolute blast. Learning how each new ball and character works and how they might be exploited to nearly break the game never got old.
Upon completing a run you will gain gold, wheat, wood and stone, all of which can be used to upgrade your village. By collecting unique blueprints from each of the eight layers of the pit, you can populate your village with a huge list of buildings that unlock new characters, generate resources and provide permanent stat boosts and bonuses.
Even your town has elements of Tetris and Breakout to it. You have limited space to place buildings and so must fit them together in a municipal jigsaw. To harvest resources, you must “shoot” your roster of characters over forest, farm and quarry tiles. Even constructing buildings requires pinging your townsfolk off the scaffolding. You can only harvest once between rounds, and so the placement of buildings and resource tiles is as important as your accuracy.
Each level of the pit has its own aesthetic, enemies, bosses and mini-bosses, and other mechanics to be wary of. From the Bone X Yard to the Smouldering X Depths, you’ll ricochet your many endless balls off skeletons, goblins, mushroom folk, dragons and many more. Upon surviving a certain amount of waves, each layer will throw two mini-bosses and one final boss at you.
These can abruptly end your run, as the way they move, attack or even just their much larger health pool may be completely at odds with your build thus far. Once you get to know their mechanics, the challenge becomes picking balls and other items that work against numerous weaker foes as well as the inevitable stronger bosses.
Ball X Pit has a great visual aesthetic, it has that distinctly Devolver low-fi, crunchy art style, with a heady dose of neon. After gaining a few upgrades, your balls will be flashing and exploding up and down the screen in a hypnotising display of colour and brightness. The various enemy and character designs are also gorgeous, and part of the thrill of unlocking a new character or reaching a new boss was just getting to see what they look like.
Similarly effective is the sound design and music. Each layer has its own track of punchy, eerie electronic music that escalates as you progress, and as the chaos increases, so too does the sound of your foes falling before your torrent of electrical, poisonous, diseased or demonic balls.
I found the final level to be a bit of an anticlimax, unfortunately. Compared to everything that came before it, this last layer is simply lacking in terms of visual aesthetic, enemy variety, bosses and unique mechanics. This is by no means a huge issue, but it was a little deflating for the wonderfully paced escalation of the bulk of the game to suddenly fizzle out.
Ball X Pit is flashy, tactile, moody and absurdly addictive. The dichotomy of fanging balls at your foes and slowly building and expanding your home base means there’s a lot to sink your teeth into here. Indeed, I had spent close to 30 hours by the time I hit credits, with plenty of stuff left to unlock. Anyone who is a fan of games like Vampire Survivors or fusing their balls (in a fun way!) owes it to themselves to check Ball X Pit out.
Rating: 8.5/10
Ball X Pit was reviewed on PS5 with a code provided by the publisher.