Ball x Pit review: "Vampire Survivors and Breakout collide in this brilliant roguelike ball basher that struggles with repetition"

At a given moment, there can be so much going on in Ball x Pit that it seems impossible to wrap your head around it. As arcs of deadly gamma radiation slice through foes set alight by the flaming projectiles ricocheting off every surface and silent sentinels advance to meet them, the screen fills so quickly with clashing light and color in an assault on the senses. Were it not for the simplicity of your goal, it might prove an unendurable assault on the senses, but Ball x Pit somehow gets you to successfully walk the narrow path between chaos and perfect strategy.

When the city of Ballbylon is wiped from the face of the earth by a meteor, it's not long before treasure hunters flock to the crater, fending off the monsters that dwell within in pursuit of riches. A roguelike twist on the classic arcade formula of Breakout, Ball x Pit's combat revolves around throwing balls at your enemies as they advance towards your character, bouncing your projectiles off walls and foes to maximize your damage. If your enemies reach you, they'll attack, and a defeated treasure hunter must begin their descent from scratch.

As greater and greater numbers of gargoyle-esque enemies advance, many spewing their own projectiles back, it's easy to become pinned down, desperately fighting for even the slightest bit of breathing room. At the start of each run, you'll have only a starting weapon and a few low-damage 'baby balls' with which to fight back, but as you grow in strength by hoovering up XP from defeated foes, you'll be able to gather more special weapons.

Different balls have different effects; damage over time in the form of Bleed or Burn; Freeze effects that can lock enemies in place; lasers that arc through entire rows or columns whenever they strike. Quickly, a fight for survival in the single inch of room at the bottom of your screen can become an eclectic fight back as your arsenal grows.

Goodness, gracious

Were it just for that enlarged arsenal, Ball x Pit would quickly prove repetitive. But every so often it'll grant the opportunity to fuse weapons together. In simple cases that might let you stitch Bleed and Burn together, increasing the damage over time dealt by a single hit. In more interesting examples, however, Balls 'evolve', gaining new effects if specific weapons are fused.

Air and lightning-themed weapons might combine to form a Blizzard with vastly improved freeze effects. Combined with a poison effect, laser-themed balls become emitters of gamma radiation, blasting their damage through entire ranks of enemies. The bleed effect can be attached to the baby ball-producing Brood Mother ball to create a Leech, which sucks the life out of even the most spongy foes.

Eventually, even those evolutions can be fused together, but that adds an interesting layer of strategy to what would otherwise remain a somewhat one-note experience. Combine too many balls, and while their effects might be potent, you might simply not have enough firepower to hold back an ever-advancing tide of enemies. Some effects also cancel each other out, and while others can be augmented by a separate collection of upgrades, it's important to concentrate on what you're upgrading in case you get overwhelmed when you least expect it.

But for all the extra complexity that comes with these evolutions, they can only obscure the fact that Ball x Pit is an inherently repetitive experience for so long. Genuine effort has been put in to make each new stage feel different from the last, with different enemies requiring different strategies, but the core conceit remains the same no matter how many new evolutions you've unlocked.

An overworld structure creates a progression system that does its best to add an extra layer to the Vampire Survivors-style structure of the main game. But the sheer amount of upgrades you can unlock both in the pit and on the surface, combined with a gathering system that quickly feels gimmicky and ineffective, only serves to show off the game's enormous size.

It's a shame, as there's a tighter experience within Ball x Pit that would have worked very well. As it stands, however, it's too big and too repetitive to last as long as it does, especially as you can feel the training weights being applied to prevent you racing your way through the entire thing. There's an artificiality to the progression curve, and you can feel the way it blocks you from moving forwards at your own pace, encouraging you instead to complete the same runs over and over to satisfy multiple different upgrade paths.

The basic experience is good enough to support the opening hours, balancing the satisfying, almost meditative percussion of ball against enemy with the tension of keeping ever more-powerful foes at bay. But after dozens of runs I was still chasing upgrades that were blatantly only in place to speed up the grind and remove training wheels that could have come off many nights before.

Ball x Pit is a smart twist on a pair of very popular formats, but even as it executes around its two inspirations very successfully, it feels like it doubts its ability to stand on its own. The result is a stylish, engaging experience trying to fill a space that's far too big for it, diluting what might have been a cult roguelike hit in the process.

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