BALL x PIT answers the age-old question, “What if you mixed Breakout/Arkanoid with Vampire Survivors-like bullet-heaven madness?”. The answer, to the surprise of no one, is a crazy mishmash of genres that works beautifully, and it’s Day One in Xbox Game Pass, although it lacks the longevity of the titles that inspired it.
The Fall of Ballbylon
Ballbylon, the zenith of Ballciety, has literally fallen through the earth, leaving a gaping hole in her crust. You shall take an intrepid crew of ball-spitting adventurers to search for riches and uncover the truth. After beating it, I’m still not 100% sure what is going on in this wacky game, other than the moon wants me to kick its ass until it opens its bussy and lets me in.
BALL x PIT is a rogue-lite game focused on building up a small town in between runs, which serves as your meta-leveling device. Things start simply, with a knight who spits out an iron ball that deals heavy damage but moves slowly. Fairly quickly, unless you’re our own Nick Baker and can’t seem to win a round, you’ll unlock dozens of other ball-spitting adventure seekers.
Each of them, unlike the default character, has a unique starting ball and passive talent. Eventually, you will bring two at a time into a run. Characters like a learned man who looks like hideous Sokrates & makes his own decisions, choosing upgrades automatically through a run, for example. A crazed Scientist breaks gravity and has his balls all fly up to the top of the screen instead of bouncing around. Mixing and matching these abilities, choosing upgrades, and evolving your balls into Satan himself are key to progression.
Spit your sac all over that mushroom
Gameplay in BALL x PIT sees your character moving around a grid-based tile set from a nearly top-down perspective. The camera moves up slowly as enemies spawn in from above at the top of the screen. Your job is to use various balls, including your trusty child balls, to murder these enemies as quickly as possible.
Early on, you only have a few balls and equipment pieces available during a run. As you progress through the game’s handful of stages, you’ll unlock new characters, who bring new balls, alongside new equipment and building blueprints. We’ll get to the building up of your town in the next section, just know it is key to progression.
As you kill enemies during a run, they will drop crystals. These crystals dole out experience points, and as you fill your experience meter up a series of upgrade choices will present themselves. Here is where the game’s strategy comes into play. Will you take your Iron Ball and mix it with a spiked one, creating a super ball that causes heavy bleeding on enemies while hitting as hard as the Iron one did?
These evolutions can only happen once both balls have reached Level 3 via in-run upgrades. You’ll need to upgrade your balls every time, though the meta progression lets them start at level 2 or 3 as you get further in. Eventually, I created Satan himself out of my two balls, which both required two other balls to create them. Every time Satan hit something, it set everyone on fire, dealing insane amounts of damage.
It’s Evoluuuuutionnnnnn
The Evolution system is part of the cosmic-looking fusion one. As each run contains three bosses, at least 6 times or so a run, a swirling rainbow upgrade will hit, and you can choose one of three options depending on how powerful and big your balls are. First is accepting a random number of balls and equipment upgrades. If you have two balls and both are level 3, then you can fuse any of them to have one ball that does what both previously did independently.
If you have certain balls, two that really love each other, then they can do an Evolution. These special, wrinkly balls have unique modifiers and powers. The Iron Ball and Fire Ball, for instance, become a bomb. Mix in the poison ball and you get a mf’ing nuke that deals massive explosive damage. The runs themselves start slowly and are rather difficult. As I reached 15+ hours in the game, I unlocked my favorite and most hated character, the Rebel.
This asshole plays the game by himself. He literally moves and chooses upgrades on his own. I used him to farm while I worked on other things, letting the game run in the background and mainly interacting to do the in-between run farm/building stuff, and send him off on another run. I think the next 10 hours+ of playtime for me were just doing that, and I started to grow bored with the game. Thankfully, I eventually hit content too difficult for him and had to take back over myself.
The game’s progression requires you to run through each stage with a certain number of characters. As you clear with each new character, you gain a cog for your elevator. Get enough, and the next level unlocks. Once you reach the final stage and beat it with enough characters, you will unlock New Game+ plus and get to do it all over again. It’s a lot harder and requires far more per-character clears to progress. To get any of this done, you’ll need to get your (extremely basic) city-building and farmer’s hat on.
Farming Simulator Pit
To power up your characters, you will run them headfirst into trees, rocks, and fields of wheat. This operates on a cooldown, and the resources gathered, along with the gold you get from running them into mines or killing enemies in runs, are used to create buildings. Those buildings require blueprints, and every stage has a different number of them to find.
Blueprints drop when you kill bosses, with a rather high chance of being spat out. Every building has its own passive benefits. There are farm-focused ones that let you stick a character inside, and they will automatically farm the area around them for resources. Others are homes, which, once built, unlock new characters.
Every character also has their own experience-based level-ups. As you level them up, you’ll get a few choices on how you want them to farm. Do they gain extra harvesting time per bounce on a specific resource, or do they get extra resources instead? The town you slowly build up is divided into a dozen or so segments that require lots of gold to unlock.
It’s a balance of building enough crops/forests/rock deposits/gold mines, and having room for all of these buildings to be built and then thrive. Figuring out how to box in your little guys as they harvest is a fun puzzle game. Building, like harvesting resources, also requires you to bounce people off of them a certain number of times. The endgame sees houses that up stats that can be upgraded endlessly. After 60 or so hours, I’m nearing the end of new game + and am roughly 500000000 times stronger than I was at the start of the game.
The Presentation
BALL x PIT has a solid mix of visuals and sounds. There’s no talking/voice work. The entire story is conveyed through an opening cutscene and then some closing ones. Outside of that, you’ll see a mix of pixel-looking textures on top of 3D models. The performance on console was a perfectly locked 60, and on my PC, it was a perfectly locked 600+. I played the game on consoles and handhelds, running at well over 200 FPS on my Legion Go. I wish they had a 120fps mode on Xbox, but I didn’t see anything like that.
These rogue-lite bullet-heaven games live and die on their music. BALL x PIT’s is good, but not great. It was never bad, with relaxing tunes while in the overworld, working on your town. The in-run music was good, but not nearly as catchy as the best tracks in games like Vampire Survivors or Deep Rock Galactic Survivor. That, mixed with the progression mostly being “do this same stage again with a new guy”, had me ready to be done after nearly 60 hours.
And you know what? That’s a-OK. Not every game has to be in the hundreds of hours territory, though. BALL x PIT’s gameplay is fun enough that I wouldn’t mind coming back to it if there were a DLC pack that gave more of a long-term progression path. It is a solid, fun game in which I experienced no bugs and had a ton of fun.
Wrapping Things Up
BALL x PIT is a brilliant mish-mash of two genres, with excellent strategic choices in its main gameplay sections. The town building may not be for all, but I enjoyed it well enough. The only minor issue was the sameness of the progression between the base game and new game plus. Still, it took me nearly 60 hours to get to that point; it’s in Game Pass on Day One, and I had a blast while doing it.
BALL x PIT
Played on
Xbox Series X (Main) and Xbox on PC
PROS
- Solid in-run progression
- Satisfying out-of-run progression
- Interesting art style
- Solid, if not spectacular OST
CONS
- Overall progression ends up being samey
- Town building is required and might not be for you
