I have three games downloaded on my phone. Two of them are Holedown and One More Brick 2, which are both, as you might have surmised, brick breaker games. As a kid, I’d often forsake my Nintendo 64 to sit at my dad’s computer and play DX-Ball, a similar game for Windows 95. There have been literally hundreds of clones of Atari’s 1976 original Breakout, so much so that they have spawned their own arcade game subgenre.
In this very specific field of brick breaking, I consider myself something of a connoisseur – since I first got a smartphone, nearly all of my time mobile gaming has been with these kinds of games. I say all this to bring weight to my statement that Ball X Pit has not only broken through the brick ceiling; it has elevated the very idea of the simple action to mechanical concepts I am still having trouble comprehending. It’s just that good.
Ball X Pit tells you everything you need to know right away. Here is a mysterious pit that might go all the way to the center of the earth. To get to the center, we’ll need to build a base of operations at the mouth and giant elevator that we can use to dive into the pit. Each level, you’ll choose a fighter with a special power, travel down a straight corridor, brick break your way through hordes of different enemy types, defeat a boss, collect resources, build up your base, and repeat.
The simplicity of the pitch is one reason I’m so excited to tell you about Ball X Pit. Even as the game progresses and becomes mechanically more complex (more on that later), it never ever deviates from the mission statement that it is simply about using balls to break bricks. Use the left stick to move your character and the right stick to aim your bounce line. These advancements twisted and turned through the roguelike formula create what I can only call the most robust arcade game I have ever had the pleasure of playing.
There are nearly 20 characters to play as, though you’ll start with the basic Warrior with no special powers. He simply shoots balls forward in a straight line, no bells and whistles. Later, you’ll unlock characters like the Ghost who shoots balls through enemies, the Juggler who tosses them down onto a specific spot, and the Rogue who shoots balls backwards. I don’t want to spoil this big one, but there’s even a late-game character that makes Ball X Pit turn-based, creating an entirely new game testing a whole different suite of skills.
Each character has a starting ball, which could be anything from Ice to Iron to Lightning. Each ball type has a different effect; whether you’re firing the Ice Ball to freeze enemies in place, the Charm Ball to turn enemies to fight for you, or even the Brood Mother to fire baby balls out of its thorax with ballistic force, you will never run out of ways to break bricks. As you kill enemies, which have many different abilities, you’ll collect gems. Gems level you up, and you need more gems for each subsequent level up. And its at the level ups that you begin to access the real meat of Ball X Pit.
When you level up, you’ll be offered a choice of three upgrades, consisting of either a new Ball or a passive. At the start of the game, you can hold 4 Balls and 4 passives at once, with the ability to increase that limit late-game. Passives include abilities like damaging enemies when they come near you, causing enemies to explode in chain reactions, and doubling damage when you hit them from the back. There are literally dozens of passives that are unlocked over the game, and the pacing is key too – you will never play through a level, win or loss, without unlocking something.
Each Ball and passive has a level, starting at 1 and going up to 3 and powering up each time with better numbers and new abilities. When defeating a large enemy, you’ll obtain a Nuclear Core. These are brilliant, because every time you grab one you’ll choose between performing Fission or Fusion. Fission has you tossing your various Balls and passives into a reactor and banging them against each other to power up between 1 and 5 of them a level. Fusion, you guessed it, fuses two Balls together into a new Fusion Ball. This has the benefit of not only freeing up a space in your loadout for a new Ball, but actually creating unique fusion abilities.
This is where your roguelike resourcefulness gets put to the test. Each run, you’ll learn the ins and outs of possible combinations, and even start to have… ideas. There’s the Ice Ball that freezes enemies and a Laser Ball that fires a beam in a horizontal line across the field. If they were the same ball, would they fire a beam that freezes every enemy in a horizontal line? They absolutely do. You can also get helper blocks on your side like archers and healers, and power them up as well. This comparison may sound insane, but the feeling I had coming up with Ball combinations to create new abilities catered specifically to my playstyle is similar to how I felt building amazing contraptions in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
We’re not done yet! Fusion Balls can utilize a Fusion Core for Evolution, a process by which they become their Final Form. For instance, fusing the Charm Ball and Vampire Ball and then evolving the result gave me the Succubus Ball, which had a chance when striking enemies to both turn them into servants for me from a love spell and cause them to feed me health as their own was drained away. If I sat here and listed all the incredible combinations I discovered in my 16 hour playtime, we’d be here for days. Trust me when I say Ball X Pit is extremely malleable to your preferred playstyle and characters.
Each level has two mini-bosses followed by a proper Boss fight, and on medium difficulty a full level will run you about 15 minutes. The pacing is incredible, because as you’re defeating enemies you’re gathering not only gems but gold, crafting resources, blueprints for new buildings, and other unlockables every few seconds. Ball X Pit goes all out to feed your brain The Good Chemicals TM every few seconds, and my ADD-addled self is thankful. When enemies reach the bottom of the screen, they launch an attack on your character and then die. Once your health drops to 0, the level is over.
After death, you’ll head back to base with whatever gold, blueprints, and new abilities you’ve gathered. Like I said before, there is always something – I never left a level, win or lose, without something new to bring back home. The base itself is incredible because even after all these complex game layers, it’s STILL ABOUT BOUNCING BALLS. You’ll harvest wood, stone, wheat, and gold and combine them to create small buildings that are placed on a grid. You can expand the base’s area over and over with gold, and you’ll need to if you want to power up your characters!
Each building is differently shaped, so you’ll need to be strategic about where you place things. Everything is freely movable at all times, and I found myself rearranging my town for the most efficient harvest every single time. You get one free harvest between runs (you can pay gold for additional ones later) to send all your characters out following a bounce line. Now, they are the balls! Whatever they bump into, they collect. This is genius and could be its own game, because it has you creating your own bounce courses, calculating angle possibilities, and at the same time putting together a thriving community that will make us all stronger. Buildings do anything from granting passives like holding more Balls to adding new characters, and even improving the power scaling of your ball bouncing stats. Just add the crafting resources needed, hurl one of your guys at it, and let momentum do the rest.
I had so much fun moving my city and calculating the possible angles, and especially placing buildings to create the most efficient gold and resource gain out of every single bounce. Plus, passive abilities can give your specific characters new powers like double-bouncing or moving through stone as they harvest it. There is so much room for customization and calculation I feel like I’m going to burst with excitement just describing it. And most of all, this gameplay loop, although completely different from the roguelike parts, is still about bouncing balls. Ball X Pit is about one thing and one thing only, and it delivers on that beyond any expectations I could have had.
And I’m still not done, because once you reach World 4 you can now use two characters at the same time, with their abilities fusing into one ability. Now, you suddenly have dozens of new character abilities to choose from, and can experiment to your heart’s content. I think my favorite combination was the Shieldbearer and the Juggler, so you could choose where your Balls fall and scatter and then bounce them back consciously at double the speed. There’s also the Ghost ability to move balls through enemies, which, coupled with the power of the Juggler can scatter balls with 360 degree coverage. I was gleeful every time I tried a new combo and felt out the best way to customize my run to match it on the fly.
The art design is incredible and of course reminds me of Devolver Digital’s previous banger Loop Hero, but the attention to detail when designing each of the 8 worlds is worth special celebration. I was worried at first that moving along a linear track would start to get boring after a few hours; I could not have been more wrong. Each world is vastly different in its design, with new types of themed enemies and bosses in each one. For instance, the Fungal Forest is of course full of mushroom monsters, but the boss of the level is a hive mind of dozens of fungal foes working in unison. The accompanying music is excellent, somehow both chill and invigorating, but all of it contributes into getting the player into The Zone, akin to something like Tetris.
Ball X Pit runs great on Steam Deck, hitting 60 FPS at full resolution with no issues. Of course it ran extremely well on my gaming PC, keeping 144 FPS at 1440p with no dips, bugs, or glitches to be seen. Ball X Pit is the kind of polished I keep forgetting to expect from games these days at launch.
I cannot overstate just how fun Ball X Pit is every second that I am interacting with it. There is no boring part of the game. I have played a few titles this year that were perhaps more epic and grand in scope, but Ball X Pit is by far the most fun I’ve had this year with a game. I have played it for at least an hour every single night for the past two weeks, trapped in The Zone, where it’s just me and the balls floating in bliss. I have not been this locked in for a long, long time. With progression this smooth, arcade action this good, and perfect balancing, Ball X Pit is an achievement of gaming and deserves to sit alongside Neon White and Tetris Effect in the pantheon of arcade-style all time greats.
Nirav reviewed Ball X Pit on PC with a provided key.
