I want to rip this band-aid off right from the jump, in the hopes of giving context: I’m not a Vampire Survivors kinda guy. That’s not to say that I don’t understand the appeal or that I even dislike the game; I have blurred, hazy memories of spending an entire weekend sweatily playing it on my Switch, giving vague, noncommittal grunts to anything my wife asked me while doing my best impersonation of a nearly middle-aged man that forgot how to use his legs. No, I like Vampire Survivors just fine, but I really hated how it made me feel. That is to say, a lizard-brained, slack-jawed caveman living purely off of instinct and the desire to watch numbers go up. I deleted it off of my Switch after that feverish weekend, vowing never to reinstall it and to also avoid this genre like the absolute plague going forward. A vow I was able to uphold, until Ball x Pit.
Ball x Pit intrigued me from the start with its premise – it’s very much a survivors-like in that it’s a stage-based roguelite in which the player is set against wave after wave (after wave after wave) of enemies, trying to survive until the end by levelling up their equipment through picking up experience gems dropped from defeated foes. But instead of most damage emanating in a radius around the player, enemies are defeated by tossing balls at different angles as the screen scrolls ever upward. Basically, picture a grungy, fantasy-themed Breakout where both the enemy pieces and the balls being used to destroy them have different properties, all with the added joy of build making and, indeed, watching those numbers go up.
It’s even more addictively satisfying than it looks and sounds, while managing to solve for my biggest Vampire Survivors gripe: that tiny aforementioned issue where it turned me into a thoughtless meat husk for a couple dozen hours. Since the player has to navigate moving their characters around the field, as well as where the balls are aiming, I found the amount of input required in Ball x Pit to be just right in terms of the meditative state it induced, without making me functionally dead to the rest of the world. Choosing to shoot at a singular enemy is almost always the incorrect thing to be doing when effort could be far better spent chipping away at a big cluster of enemies to create irregular shapes that shots can be angled into, thus constructing little corridors of infinite bouncy death to damage entire groups of foes at alarmingly high rates of speed. Ball x Pit constantly rewarded me for creating these opportunities for myself, and it would be a fun enough game on its own even if it didn’t introduce any real swerves to this basic setup. It does, however, have the swerves, by way of its different characters and balls.
Firstly, each playable character has their own unique properties and initial ball. These properties start off relatively simple, of course, like The Itchy Finger’s higher firing rate at the cost of accuracy, or The Repentant, whose balls gain more power each time they bounce off of anything but will spectrally return to him if they touch the back wall. But some of the latter characters have quite literally game-changing abilities, some of which genuinely floored me; I don’t want to spoil too much, but one of the late-game characters actually turns Ball x Pit into a turn-based game. It’s as wild as it sounds and works amazingly well, given the type of game this is. Turn-based actually became a favourite way of mine to play when I wanted a break from the standard gameplay, as I could think about where best to aim my destruction in between sips of my coffee and editing a podcast.
Just as wild to me is the unlockable ability to play the game as two characters at the same time. The traits and starting ball of each are shared, and both are represented on screen at the same time, meaning it does become harder to not take damage from projectiles, but that cost is more than worth it for the insanity of the build potential that suddenly opens up from this innocuously presented upgrade. Not all characters can be paired together, unfortunately, but it’s usually not more than a couple that are greyed out from teaming up, and in all cases, it made perfect sense why certain combinations were incompatible.
For as fun as all the different playable characters are, the variety of balls are just as important in giving Ball x Pit its variety. Most balls start off pretty straightforward, like ones that have chances to cause self-explanatory burning or poison effects. You can level these up with the gems dropped by defeated enemies, but far more interesting is the ability to evolve two level 3 balls into a new one, making new effects that combine the best of both. These are just as useful as one might imagine, while also causing a lot of dopamine-inducing screen-filling chaos, with lasers, magma pools, and baby balls taking up every inch of the playfield not occupied by an enemy. My personal favourites were The Sun and The Mosquito King, the former of which blinds enemies and causes burns on direct contact, while the latter ball spawns a new mosquito each time it hits an enemy, which then targets and attacks random enemies on the field while also healing the player.
Rounding out the characters and the balls are relics, which can be levelled up just like the balls. These largely tend to give passive effects, such as higher critical damage chances when hitting enemies from certain angles or drawing in gems from further distances, though there are also ones that spawn help pieces for you, such as archers and healers. The relics are vital to Ball x Pit’s build crafting, though there’s nothing here as table upending or subversive as the characters or balls themselves.
There is a town-building component to the game to be engaged with in-between attempts at levels themselves. This is fun enough and a cute contextualisation for resource gathering and upgrading; blueprints for new buildings and facilities are found in the main levels and then must be constructed using materials and money. Even the town management portion of the game is built around balls and angles, as the player has to line up a shot and send out (or shoot, basically) their lineup of characters, and each time a character touches a resource or an under-construction building, materials are gathered and the build meter goes up, respectively. I found myself losing interest in this part of Ball x Pit as it went on, largely due to how difficult it was, visually, to remember which buildings were what and which ones still needed to be upgraded. It’s not a negative, far from it, but I was usually just itching to get back to my endless hordes of skeletons and mushrooms to kill, as well as the screen-filling bosses they protected.
If there is a downside to Ball x Pit, it’s that the world itself just sort of washed over me. I can actually see this being a positive for a lot of people, but when I think of most of my favourite roguelites, such as Spelunky, Hades, or Star of Providence, there’s always been a little bit more to chew on when it comes to their world and lore, as well as arcane secrets to discover. In my over 30 hours with Ball x Pit, I have not run into anything like that, with the game’s actual structure never doing anything to subvert my expectations. I wager I can easily sink another 30 hours in at least given what the game has on offer, which is fantastic, but I just found myself waiting for a moment where I was asked to do something besides beat levels with a certain amount of characters before coming back to town and building up new facilities.
More than just gameplay secrets, I actually would have enjoyed a bit more characterisation and world-building than what’s on display here; I think the characters and setting are genuinely cool looking, and I’d have loved to get a bit more to chew on. It’s hard to be too disappointed with how top-of-the-line the actual gameplay of Ball x Pit is, though.
And for anyone concerned with the performance of the Switch 1 version of the game (like I very much was), don’t be: I miraculously only encountered a few bouts of slowdown and one crash, and that was when the screen was filled to the absolute brim with effects, balls, and enemies (the work of that darn Mosquito King I’m so fond of, actually). The visual effect of the game that subtly simulates what I’d best describe as an old PC monitor is also doing a lot of the heavy lifting in not just giving the game its unique look and style, but letting Ball x Pit’s chunky character models look good while maintaining a very solid framerate and resolution.
