syltefar.com

Image source: mobygames.com

Ball x Pit is an very satisfying action RPG similar to a mix of the upgrade system and level progression from Vampire Survivors and the city-building of Loop Hero. It plays like a dual-joystick ball and paddle game, while the city-building strategy layer serves to upgrade your characters.

The game has charming retro 3D graphics, satisfying sound, and pretty good music.

Although the basic gameplay is fun and challenging, the meat of the game is in building your character by choosing upgrades. You unlock balls which are your main weapons, and passive upgrades such as critical damage improvements or health regeneration. Every mission takes 15 minutes, and gives you resources for your city, and blueprints for new buildings.

The ball upgrades is where the main tactics happen. You make a character build of 4 balls from a large set of potential balls, and you can fuse all the basic ball types, combining their abilities in a very clever way. Even more fun are the Evolutions, where combining two balls produces an entirely new ball with unique abilities. These Evolved balls can be fused with basic balls and other Evolved balls as well, making for a crazy number of combinations!

3 times in each level you will be challenged by a boss fight. Usually, the final boss shoots a myriad of bullets at you, giving the game a bit of a bullet hell shooter fun to keep you on your toes. Whether you beat the boss or not is mostly down to your character build, but you can nudge the outcome in your favor if you are really good at dodging bullets and aiming your balls.

The early characters you unlock change the game rules slightly. For example:

• The Embedded change how the ball collision work, balls now penetrate enemies when moving upwards, and will tend to get stuck at the top of the screen.
• The Shade fires balls from the back of the field, which results in more strategic gameplay, mostly focused on upgrades, and incredibly powerful against bosses that are only vulnerable from the rear (wuch as the stage 1 skeleton boss)..

The characters you unlock later in the game have much wider-reaching consequences, almost fundamentally changing the genre of the game. A few examples:

• The Cogitator chooses upgrades for you (pretty randomly), which turns the game into a simple arcady game with random power-ups, akin to Arkanoid.
• The Shieldbearer has a shield, which works like a paddle, allowing you to keep balls in play, dealing extra damage.

I won't spoil the rest, but there are a few more characters that change up the gameplay significantly. Early on, you unlock the ability to combine the abilities of two characters, which feels like a clever game design trick, similar to how you can combine balls.

The progression is very satisfying. Your characters feel very weak in the beginning, but by carefully building your city and upgrading, you will slowly become immensely powerful. The strategy layer is easily understandable, but has enough complexity to dive into to make it satisfying. In the late game, you unlock buildings that can be infinitely upgraded, allowing you to keep making your characters stronger indefinitely, which also feels quite satisfying.

There are a few flaws, one being the slightly annoying controls for the city-building on console (which you do get used to), and a few minor bugs, the main one being the targeting cursor getting stuck in an incorrect position on the screen. The game can still be played as normal, it just looks weird.

I spent 40 hours with this game, got the platinum trophy, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Compared to Vampire Survivors, this has a much tighter game design, the ball combinations are very interesting to strategize around, and the game carefully paces features and unlocks in a satisfying manner, and it feels like a much more polished experience. It also looks and sounds much better. The city-building gameplay is similar to Loop Hero, but it's much easier to understand, and still deeper.

Review score: (great)