I’m a bit saddened by my experience with Ball x Pit, an original breakout-meets-vampire-survivors, the game mostly has all the mechanics I enjoy in roguelikes - a good sense of progression, addictive moment to moment gameplay, a bunch of things to unlock and interesting choices to be made during your runs. Sadly, I couldn’t manage to beat the second stage, no matter what I did and I got stuck there long enough to become frustrated and lose interest trying to struggle through it.
After a cool intro cutscene, you are thrown into the first level of the game, the bone pit, for a little tutorial about the flow of the game. You move your character around with WASD and shoot balls (either special ones, or normal ones) by aiming with the mouse and clicking (or enabling auto-shoot). Enemies come from the top of the screen and move towards the bottom; if they connect with your characters with a wide range of attacks (ranged or melee) or if they get to the bottom of the screen and stay there for too long, you take damage. Lose all your life and you’re out of the level. You can see your progress through a track on the right side of the screen, and you fight minibosses before a larger than life boss at the end.
By defeating enemies and collecting experience crystals, you gain some stats that relate to in-game effects like basic damage, crit chance, and the like, even though you do not choose which stat to level up. You also get to pick four special balls and four passive abilities; they can be really cool and have effects like hitting enemies in rows or columns, inflicting status effects, spawning more balls, etc. By finding special items you can combine or evolve balls and passive abilities, either creating new ones that have more than one effect, or completely new effects entirely.
Between battles, you collect resources by throwing your characters around in your city that you develop using gold and the aforementioned resources, such as wood, rocks and wheat. This is a fun little minigame that you get to play for a limited time and you can upgrade characters and buildings to give you more time or more resources. You also construct buildings the same way, and this is the way to unlock new characters and more game mechanics.
Ultimately, no matter what I did, no matter which character I tried, I couldn’t get anywhere in the second stage. Even beating the first one over and over, trying to improve my team and the like. I was a bit baffled! Normally the second level wouldn’t be where a huge difficulty spike occurs, or maybe there was some core mechanic I didn’t fundamentally understand, but no matter what I did, I stayed stuck, and that didn’t felt right so I dropped the game there; with five characters unlocked and most of the versions of the first map completed.
Which is a shame! I really dug Ball x Pit’s vibe and style and the core mechanics really seemed solid, I’m just not sure what happened there.
