Ball x Pit is excellent. Can I end this review now?
No? The editor guy, Matt, is telling me to do my job before I can go back to playing, so I guess not (yeah, I’m a total dictator like that – ed.)
Dammit. Very well then.
Conceptually, Ball x Pit could be described as “Breakout on Steroids”. I’m as big a retro fan as the next gamer – maybe even more so – but honestly, I’ve long found Breakout to be a rather tedious game; it was definitely improved when Taito (ahem) “borrowed” its concept for Arkanoid back in the 1980s, and there’s been a few reimaginings of the original since then too – but nothing that’s grabbed my attention quite as much as Kenny Sun & Friends’ Ball x Pit has over the past couple of weeks.
That’s because while it’s ostensibly a Breakout-inspired game, along the way it picks up a skill tree and roguelike elements that shift it variously from Breakout to Pinball with elements of Pachinko and a fair smattering of bullet hell shooters thrown into the mix.
There’s a bare semblance of plot; the fall of the city of Ballbylon (ho ho ho) has left a massive pit full of monsters, and it falls to you, the hero – and eventually a whole cadre of selectable characters – to clear them out level by level while also building a resource generating city from the spoils you plunder on each run.
Where Breakout and (mostly) Arkanoid managed ball motion based on the angle you hit a ball at, Ball X Pit gives you direct aiming control, and you’ll need it. Each character starts with their own powered up ball type with specific characteristics, but you’ll quickly spawn a whole host of baby balls, as well as levelling up within each run to get new ball types to bounce back up at your foes.
You don’t fail when balls go past your hero at all, but that does introduce a delay in firing them back up the screen that can become problematic, especially later on in a level where there can be dozens of enemies that need to be destroyed before they get within attack range of your character.
There’s also a light roguelike element here, as your powerup choices are randomised, and each ball type can be levelled up, evolved into new forms and even fused with other balls to form more powerful single entities. Fusing balls together also frees up a powerup slot, which means there’s a simple level of strategy when choosing your powerup paths and which combat types you like, especially later on in the game where you unlock characters who may fire from the top of the screen, or have balls bounce off the bottom, or when you’re able to utilise two characters at once for hybrid power fun.
The city/resource building part of Ball x Pit is built around a similar Breakout-esque theme, because in order to actually construct new buildings or harvest resources, you fire a series of your worker characters to bounce between them on your growing city.
It must be hell working under such conditions, but safety concerns aside, this is a weaker side of Ball x Pit, mostly because it’s not quite as hectic and engaging. I quickly fell into a pattern of placing new buildings directly into the straight firing zone of my harvests until they were complete, shuffling them off to the sides, lather, rinse, repeat.
If this was 100 per cent of Ball x Pit, I would have given up rather quickly on it, but thankfully, the core game retains that classic “one more go” appeal to it, especially once there are hundreds of balls and special effects flying around to help you get through some of the trickier later levels and bosses. One word of caution here; while classic Breakout probably wouldn’t affect anyone with sensitivity to flashing patterns, that is NOT true for Ball x Pit. It gets busy and it gets flashy even on the earliest and simplest levels.
Ball x Pit isn’t terribly long, with just eight levels and 15 characters to unlock, though you are encouraged to replay earlier levels with new characters to add stat boosts and unlock additional building blueprints as you go.
There’s definitely some I enjoyed more than others; the Shade who fires from the top is notably challenging, while using the Shieldbearer or including him in a duo makes for an easier game thanks to his wide bounce back shield and automatic experience gem collection abilities. Meanwhile, the Tactician turns the game on its head, turning into a turn-based game of precise firing patterns. Turn-based Breakout on paper sounds like the dullest experience ever, but somehow it works.
Ball x Pit is a very easy game to pick up and play, though it’s also one where the central gameplay conceit is very much present in the free demo; I could see some gamers bouncing (pun not intended) off it pretty hard, but if the demo intrigues you, trust me, there’s a lot more to come that does get addictive fast.
