“Ball x Pit” is a 2025 release published by Devolver Digital and developed by Kenny Sun, who spent the prior decade making mobile games. That background in the mobile space can be seen and felt in “Ball x Pit,” but it luckily comes without the shallow gameplay and sleazy monetization practices that are so often unavoidable in the phone game market.
The premise of “Ball x Pit” is simple yet ingenious in a way that might have you thinking, “How has nobody done this before?” Combining the ever-popular (if increasingly oversaturated) rogue-lite genre with a brick-breaking game is a core idea that was bound to get people salivating. Specifically, “Ball x Pit” owes just as much to 2022’s “Vampire Survivors” as it does to “Brick Out” and similar ball-bouncing titles. But unlike many other games following in the wake of “Vampire Survivors,” this one doesn’t feel like a complete shameless ripoff and instead brings plenty of its own ideas to the table.
The gameplay remained fresh for an impressively long time for me. Part of that has to do with the changing levels feeling meaningfully different. Rather than just color-coded biomes, each level brings different enemies, bosses, and little environmental challenges that require you to adjust your strategies from one stage to the next.
Part of the game’s lasting freshness has to do with the drip-feeding of new weapons and passives. You begin the game with quite a large pool of level-up options to choose from, and it continues to grow larger with each stage that you clear. Finding new synergies, fusions, and evolutions with different ball types remains extremely satisfying until you’ve discovered them all.
And part of its freshness has to do with the large roster of characters that the game packs. I was impressed by not just the sheer number of characters available to unlock but also by how differently each character plays. These characters aren’t as simplistic as essentially just being skins or having different starting weapons, they shake up the gameplay in major ways. A character that uses a shield to bounce balls back requires an entirely different approach from one that fires balls from the back instead of the front, and a character that only does AOE damage requires an entirely different approach than one that fires a high volume of smaller balls in two opposing directions. Being able to bring two characters along at a time later further multiplies the potential synergies and strategies at your disposal.
However, it is worth noting that not all of these characters are good inclusions. There are two in particular that take much of the gameplay out of your hands: one that chooses upgrades automatically, and one that chooses upgrades and plays for you automatically. If these were treated like an assist-mode for players that are struggling to clear a level, it could make more sense, but they aren’t; the latter is even one of the last characters you unlock. It seems like backwards thinking to reward the player with a character that removes all of their agency. Needless to say, I was never tempted to try either of those characters.
The game also includes a resource-management “harvest” phase in between runs of the main game. There are a lot of options here and tons of unlocks and upgrades to keep you busy, but there isn’t as much depth to this side of the game as there could have been, and it’s easy to amass more resources than you could ever possibly use. It’s going for a similar sort of balance as what “Cult of the Lamb” nailed so well but not coming particularly close to that high bar. Even still, it makes for a welcomed change of pace between runs and makes the gameplay loop feel more varied. The core gameplay of “Ball x Pit” is already moreish, and the little harvest intermissions make the game even more addictive. Many great rogue-lites give you that “just one more run” sensation, and “Ball x Pit” ups the ante by getting you to say, “I’ll just do one more harvest real quick before I stop playing for a bit.” But as soon as you finish the harvest, you’ll probably find yourself craving another run of the main game already.
The bosses are another good way to provide variety, but these could have been handled a bit better. Each level has two mini-bosses and one main boss. The mini-bosses are hit or miss, with most just being a bit bullet spongy but not particularly difficult. The main bosses are flashy and have complex attack patterns that bridge into the bullet-hell genre a little bit, but sadly, the fights often end up being more tedious than challenging. The bosses have way too much health and simply take far too long to kill, even when maxing out the game’s built-in “speed-up” feature. The bosses look flashy and difficult at first, but they wind up being easy as they repeat the same attack patterns over and over and over again throughout each prolonged fight.
Runs can end up feeling a little too long in general as well (around 25-30+ minutes). The protracted boss fights might be the main culprits, but the long walks in between start to drag sometimes too, especially in the later levels, which make the classic mistake of increasing the length more than the actual challenge. Luckily, it takes many hours of playing before the juiced-up gameplay begins to lose its luster, and I was able to see and experience almost all of what the game had to offer before it started to wear out its welcome to any degree.
Just like with “Vampire Survivors,” comparisons between “Ball x Pit” and candy or stimulants are apt. The sounds, colors, and flashy visuals that accompany your various weapons and upgrades are so satisfying. The sense of feedback could make or break this type of game, and it’s this area that “Ball x Pit” most thoroughly nails. Everything has the perfect level of juiced-up sheen to make bouncing these balls as enticing and gratifying as possible. It nails exactly what it’s going for in that department. Sure, this component might be surface level, but it makes a huge difference in terms of game-feel and helps the clever core gameplay shine.
samkench.com 
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