BALL x PIT - Switch 2 Review

If the indie gaming sphere has taught us anything, it's that you really can just turn any classic established game into a roguelike. Throwing its hat into the ring next is BALL x PIT, a roguelike game based on the Atari classic Breakout. After a meteor annihilated the great city of Ballbylon, an enormous gaping pit was left in its wake. Treasure hunters from far and wide flock to the city’s tomb to seek their fortune, plumbing the depths in search of Ballbylon’s scattered riches with very few making it out alive.

The Good

It's not hard to envision what a roguelike version of Breakout could look like, and BALL x PIT does a fantastic job bringing that vision to life. Each playable character starts with a signature ball with its own effect, a handful of regular balls and a passive ability to ease players into that character’s playstyle. Waves of enemies will slowly approach from the top of the screen, and the player has to stop them from reaching the bottom. Enemies drop gold and materials to go towards restoring the city of Ballbylon alongside experience to level up the player and give them new balls or passive abilities to help them in the run. It’s a pretty simple inclusion in the Breakout formula, but it is executed very well.

My favourite addition is the item fusion; a lot of games like this (especially those in the Survivors-like/Bullet Heaven genre) let you fuse together two specific weapons into a more powerful one. BALL x PIT does this as well but also allows you to fuse two balls that normally wouldn’t go together into a new one that shares the properties of both, which frees up space for the player to find more balls along their run and can lead to some devastating combinations. My favourite that I found was a ball I had already fused together that fired lasers both vertically and horizontally whenever it hit an enemy, and then I fused it with a ball that spawns three to five regular balls on impact.

TL;DR

• Satisfying gameplay
• Seemingly infinite item fusion

The Bad

While I do enjoy BALL x PIT’s art style, I do find that it makes the game very visually busy at times, making it very hard to see everything on screen. You have to pay attention to where your balls are and where they are going, all the enemies on screen, what enemies drop when defeated and projectiles that enemies shoot at you leading to quite the information overload that was already going to be difficult to keep track of but made more difficult by the art style.

On top of all this you also have a city management mode with the rebuilding of Ballbylon. This allows you to place down facilities that can give you permanent buffs for future runs, unlock new characters to play as or act as a way to gather resources outside of regular runs. This is all well and good until you realise that you have to place everything in such a way that it too resembles a game of Breakout. To build new facilities, you have to reserve space and then fling your residents at them as if they were balls and watch them bounce around the place. Once a certain number of residents have collided with the empty plot, the facility will be built. I understand what the developers were trying to do here, but I very quickly got tired of having to deal with this whole aspect of the game; every time I finished a run, I’d groan knowing that I had to go back and deal with the city management before I could do another run.

TL;DR

• Visually busy
• Town management feels lacklustre

Final Score: 6/10

While I did enjoy my time with BALL x PIT, I honestly don’t think I’ll be revisiting it anytime soon. It's a cool idea executed well, but with the vast amount of games in the roguelike genre, it doesn’t do enough to make itself stand out amongst the crowd.

Thank you for checking out our BALL x PIT Switch review, thank you to Devolver Digital (via Powerup PR) for providing the review code and thank you to our Patreon Backers for their ongoing support:

• Andrew Caluzzi (Inca Studios / Camped Out)
• Bel Cubitt
• Bobby Jack
• Jack Caven
• Nintendo Maniacs
• RedHero