Though an amalgamation of ideas, BALL x PIT makes for simple, addicting fun. Its ball-breaker concept is packed with enough variety to keep you hooked for increasingly harder challenges.
BALL x PIT proves that even after 30 years, the simplest of concepts can still be iterated upon in unique ways.
1976’s Breakout was a simple, single-player answer to Pong. What if there was only one paddle that moved and players had to use the trajectory of the ball to chip away at a wall of bricks? Okay, sure. Ten years later, Arkanoid spiced things up by adding better physics and power-ups to the concept.
In essence, a ball-breaking game is merely that: a game where players use some form of a paddle to launch a ball-like object into the field to break a series of obstacles so the level will end. Enemies can be added. Traps can throw the player off. Items can hinder or help performance. But you can’t really go much further from that concept before it becomes something completely different, right?
“What if you add characters with unique abilities?” Okay, that makes sense. “What if one of those characters fires from the back of the board and not the front?” What? “But what if you add base building?” Huh? “And what if the resource tiles at your base act like bricks that the characters bounce off of to harvest resources for upgrades?” Uh…
BALL x PIT seems like a weird game and it is. But it’s really not.
Over the course of 40 hours I was glued to BALL x PIT. I thought about it while I was at work, wishing I could just hop into a few speedy rounds and watch that screen scroll ever downwards. I think that I was the first person on PlayStation 5 to get the Platinum trophy for the game. That felt good. And because players eventually unlock a character that literally plays the game for them, I would leave BALL x PIT on in the background while I took phone calls, wrote other reviews, or played games on my phone, always looking up at the TV to see what kind of chaos was playing out.
That might make the act of playing BALL x PIT sound forgettable but it’s actually the opposite. What’s so appealing is that it truly is as dead simple to grasp as a Breakout or Arkanoid.
Conceptually there is a bare-bones idea of a fantasy-adjacent village descending deeper into a hellish pit of demons and ne’er-do-wells to rid said pit of danger. Players are plopped down into a stage with their selected character and are given free movement and control. As time ticks on so do the enemies that drop down from the top of the screen and work their way to the bottom. Players direct balls to bounce on these enemies, chipping away at their health before they get to the bottom. Once an enemy hits the bottom of the screen, it damages the player before disappearing, unless it’s one of the mid-stage bosses that just keeps attacking until it or the player is dead. Get too close to an enemy and it hurts the player. Defeated enemies drop coin, resources, and experience.
Whittling the mechanics of BALL x PIT down to those simple concepts makes the game digestible. But there truly isn’t much complexity to it outside of that. Players pick a character that shoots balls to destroy enemies from top to bottom. Survive the steady flow until reaching a boss and the player walks away victorious with rewards in tow.
Even those elements by themselves are enough to support a game. Not a particularly interesting or replayable one by today’s standards, obviously. In 1976, Breakout was fun but there was little else to compare it to. Today you might play it perfectly emulated in a browser for a few minutes and move on to breaking blocks to build worlds in Minecraft. And this is where BALL x PIT developer Kenny Sun branched out the genre to its limits.
The roster of characters is one of the foundational ways BALL x PIT strives to be different. At the start, players have a Knight that has no abilities and a flail ball that inflicts bleed damage on enemies. Over the course of the game, new characters are unlocked. One may fire rapidly but scattered, another fires a singular ball with greater area-of-effect damage, while another’s balls will pass through enemies and do bonus damage. More than a dozen characters are unlocked and each one has a defining quirk that can make them quite strong when attached to the right equipment.
A handful of these characters are weird and meant to be kind of silly and obtuse. The Scientist has balls that are constantly pulled towards the back of the screen, which is useful until the player eliminates the back rows and must wait for those balls to reset. The Tactician actually makes the action of BALL x PIT turn-based, allowing the player to perfectly set up a shot, freezing enemies and projectiles until the turn is done.
And because this is a ball-breaker game, BALL x PIT features numerous balls for players to use. Each character starts with their own unique ball that has a special property attached to it. A poison ball does damage that ticks away enemy health, vertical and horizontal laser balls will inflict damage on rows and columns of enemies when they strike. Balls can freeze enemies in place or slow their movement. Enemies can be charmed by specific balls and retreat while damaging their friends. Most characters also emit “baby balls” which are small white balls that do less damage but can also be influenced by equipment.
During a round, leveling up will grant players the opportunity to choose a new ball or passive ability or level up a currently-acquired piece of equipment. It’s here where all the mechanics begin to evolve as synergies between balls, the selected character, and passive abilities take on increased importance.
When two balls reach level 3, they can be evolved into a new type of ball that borrows elements from both special balls. One of the easiest examples is combining a fully-leveled Earth ball–which typically does splash damage, with a fully-leveled Poison or Fire ball. These new evolutions will cause puddles of magma or toxic to crawl upward, hitting the flow of enemies and doing new types of damage. Additionally, the option exists to fuse two level 3 balls together. While this is not the same as an evolution, a fused ball retains the properties of both balls, freeing up a new ball slot for players.
Passive abilities, while not as important as the balls that do active damage, can be extremely beneficial, especially when the player uncovers their evolved forms. Passive items can increase critical damage inflicted on specific sides of an enemy, double the frequency or damage of baby balls, spawn helpers that heal the player or attack enemies, or amplify other types of damage.
When playing BALL x PIT I was struck by memories of the most chaotic runs of The Binding of Isaac. As that game evolved over time, it felt like hundreds of item combinations could be fused onto Isaac to make him helpless or god-like. Fans of Vampire Survivors are likely to find more of a home with BALL x PIT merely because of the item evolutions and chaotic use of projectiles. Though BALL x PIT never gets that insane, there are times where slotting in the wrong ball with a character can leave the player helplessly watching a ball bounce before it respawns.
Players are meant to be mildly careful with their aim, not always just trying to hit the closet enemy. Styling itself as a ball-breaker, players should be mindful of creating tunnels and back-channels that can have balls rapidly ricocheting against enemy blocks, doing increased damage, especially when amplified by passive abilities. But if you grab that item that allows balls to pass through enemies until reaching the back of the board without any precaution, you’re going to sit there in agony as the backline is destroyed and the front painfully advances.
Stages in BALL x PIT are sweepingly-themed. You have the ice environment, the graveyard, the desert area, the volcano place. Enemies, for the most part, are stationary foes with a few animation frames. With each new stage players enter, some wrenches are thrown in the works. Enemies might hover in the air, avoiding damage briefly. Other may splash poison, or grab a ball and hold it out of play, or disappear underground. Regardless of the stage, there are enemies that shoot projectiles of varying speed that must be avoided.
In totality, BALL x PIT doesn’t drastically change from moment to moment. Every stage has three waves of enemies, broken up by two mid-bosses and a final end boss. Each new stage has harder and harder enemies. Players can change the game’s speed twice to make things move faster. And upon defeating a stage, a “fast” mode unlocks that goes all the way up to Fast 9+, where the base speed goes from 15 minutes to 5, meaning there is little breathing room between waves of enemies.
To entice players to dive a little deeper, these harder speeds and greater challenges are easier felled by investing into the town-building mechanic of BALL x PIT.
After returning from a failed or successful run, players use their resources to build structures, and plant resource nodes of wheat, wood, and stone. To harvest, players will use any collected character and line them up like a ball, aiming them in a specified direction. Once the characters are launched, they will proceed to bounc against buildings, resource nodes, and the borders of the village until time runs out. When bounced against a resource node, characters collect it. Simple, right?
Though a strange system, it absolutely works in the unruly logic of BALL x PIT. And the beauty is that the constant feed of upgrades and rewards doesn’t start out slow. The game is immensely generous with players’ time, meaning that grinding doesn’t feel arduous. Each stage has a number of blueprints of buildings to unlock, meaning that each one will need to be played four or five times at minimum to unlock every blueprint. Characters are unlocked for play once their respective homes are built. As characters level up, players might be given the option to have them pass through a resource node rather than bounce on it, add to the harvesting timer, or collect an additional resource.
The building mechanic is dead simple but works to be fun by having all the buildings be oddly-shaped. And several buildings can influence other characters or nodes, depending on where they are placed. Farms and mines can be placed and filled with characters to automatically harvest nearby nodes. And over the course of the game, extremely beneficial building are unlocked. Players will be able to bring two characters into a fight, amplify base stats of characters to make them stronger, unlock item rerolls, grant additional item slots, and more.
While BALL x PIT has a natural “end point” where all buildings can be acquired and all stages can be beaten, an effort is made to have it be infinitely replayable. Players are able to beat every single stage at their fastest speeds, with each new character beating it adding to a damage or effect multiplier. Additionally, buildings that require massive resource investment can be infinitely upgraded to raise the base stats of all characters, granting them more health, speed, and damage. A New Game+ bracket also opens up for every stage, making them harder but also retaining the additional speed options.
Should players want, they can sink countless hours into BALL x PIT just for clout. The game certainly allows it and encourages it. As I said, the option exists to literally have the game play itself, selecting upgrades and lining up shots. It’s not meant to be taken seriously, it’s meant to be fun. Almost mechanically I would go into a stage, power through it, shoot my characters into the town for a harvest and watch them zip around, and go right back into the action.
BALL x PIT conceptually has a simple hook. And because of that, its core gameplay will inherently be repetitive at some point depending on the player. But its chunky fantasy world has personality and its soundtrack is, honestly, phenomenal. They add to the charm of a game that houses a surprising amount of depth and content for what the back of the box might allude to. Sure, it’s about ball-breaking. But to not enjoy this would be nuts.
