I had to take some time off last week, and so I missed the launch day review rush for Ball X Pit. That meant I got to watch the scores come in and I’m not going to lie, I was delighted by the critical response to the game, and my expectations were sent through the roof.
As soon as I pulled myself out of my own pit of sickness and misery, I downloaded the game on my Xbox (it’s on Game Pass) and I started working through the campaign. Here’s how I got on…
What is Ball X Pit?
There’s no need to get lost in the weeds on this one, as I’m just about the last person in the world to review it, and you probably already know that it’s a mix of old-school Breakout gameplay, fantasy tropes, roguelite progression, and auto-shooter goodness.
There’s another key element to the game that I really enjoyed, and that’s the base-building. Between runs, you can drop buildings, move them around, and expand the map before sending your characters on a mini-Breakout ping-pong around your base to pick up resources. It’s a fantastic little palette cleanser.
Whose throwing all those balls?
Technically, it’s developer Kenny Sun and friends, and publisher Devolver Digital. However, within the confines of the game, the balls are being thrown by a little character that stands at the bottom of a long corridor. There are several to unlock over the course of the campaign, and each one has a starting special power and a gameplay gimmick, whether that be the soldier and his spikey balls, the hip-shooting gunslinger and his spray-it approach to aiming.
In the tried and tested Breakout style, you’ve got enemies that appear at the top of the screen, which you need to shoot with your avatar’s mix of bouncing balls and special attacks. However, it’s not long before the gameplay loop starts to feel more akin to a Vampire Survivors-inspired auto-shooter, with XP dropping all over, new powers to choose from, and incremental upgrades that unlock as you play.
Specialist balls
One of the most fun parts of the game is experimenting with the different special balls that you’re regularly offered. You’ve got to equip up to four, level them up, but then you can fuse and evolve these balls to get them even more powerful abilities. Herein lies the creative heart of the game, and it’s a lot of fun.
There are loads of different abilities to unlock, but to start off with, I always like trying out the electric powers to see how they work. I wasn’t disappointed here, as you can chain your hits together, sending ripples of Force Lightning through the blocks coming at you.
When you start to mix and match your balls, you can evolve them, and support those evolutions with items that grant passive bonuses. These might include boosting a crit chance if you hit an enemy tile from the side or the rear, or increasing certain damage types.
Blocks that hit back
Things start off slowly with a few mild enemies at the top of the screen, but it’s not long before they start to pile up. Once the screen starts to fill, you’ll need to implement some tactics, and there’s fun to be had in trying out new ways to stem the tide of descending blocks.
While most of them just march down the screen at a slow but steady pace, some of the blocks fire projectiles at you, which you’ll need to watch out for. Things get much more serious when they make it to the foot of the screen, and your character is boxed in. Let them get too close and they’ll hit you for big damage, and if several arrive at once, you’re screwed, basically.
Then there are the bosses, which have all felt manageable and fair so far, with mid-level bosses mixed in with the horde, before a bigger challenge at the end of each biome. Furthermore, I appreciated the run structure and how the back and forth with your base building means that losing to a level boss isn’t a total waste of time.
So is it a baller, or is it the pits?
I have to say, I have thoroughly enjoyed my time with Ball X Pit, and I’m going to keep chipping away at it, I reckon. It combines the zen flow of a survivors-like with the arcade action of Breakout, and I’m totally here for this combo (it worked a treat in Breaking Survivors, too).
I think if there’s one thing holding it back from global domination, it’s the repetitive feel that you get from having to level up all of your underpowered characters; you’ve got to grind their stats one at a time, although there is at least some shared progression to mitigate it. In my opinion, this translates into a meta game that feels like it has been spread just a little bit too thin.
This is far from a serious problem, though, and once I’ve finished writing this up, I’m going to add Ball X Pit to my list of the best bullet heavens, auto-shooters, and games like Vampire Survivors. It might not be an all-time classic, but I do think it’s a bunch of fun.
Ball X Pit is out now on PC (Mac, Win), Switch, PS5, and Xbox, and a Switch 2 version is due out in later 2025.
