Ball x Pit

More Like: Ball X Pitty the Wasted Potential I'm a big rogue-lite guy. I've sunk hundreds of hours into all sorts of rogue-lite games from the moment I play the first #[game:2132:The Binding of Isaac] . #[game:40477:Slay the Spire] is probably my most played singleplayer game of all time. I'm familiar with all the different genre-bending takes on the formula that have been popping up over the last decade or so. These days, if I see another "#[game:251833:Balatro] except instead of poker it's about Treseta" or "#[game:186725:Vampire Survivors] but memes" I might even roll my eyes. However, when I played the Ball X Pit ("Vampire Survivors but it's also Space Invaders") Demo I had a pretty great time and bought the game on release. The initial impression is fantastic. The game is split into 15 minute "runs" and a city building meta progression mini game that allows you to improve your characters and stats in-between runs. The core gameplay loop is tight and satisfying, it looks, sound and plays great. Fusing the balls into previously undiscovered combos is a thrilling experience for the first couple of hours. You complete a run, upgrade your city, manage your workers and their workload, maybe unlock a new level, go on another run and so on and so on. In the meantime, you're also unlocking new characters, some have slight gameplay changes, some turn it into a completely different game. For example, The Tactician turns it turn-based, other fires from the back of the screen etc. Then you unlock the option to take two characters on each run, unlock more interesting and fun combinations of mechanics. It's really shaping up to be a potential staple in the rogue lite pantheon, but then the cracks start to show. Everything I've described above makes the game already worth the price, and I am still playing it despite seeing the credits! So, for the rest of this review I'll go over what, in my opinion, holds it back from being a really great game. Knowledge is almost entirely useless. Some of the best rogue-lites utilise the fact that the player uses newly acquired knowledge to increase their chances of success. This can vary from learning boss patterns, remembering shortcuts or learning ways to cheese some challenges. The impact of knowledge on a run's success varies wildly from game to game, and it's usually reversely correlated to the amount of stat-based meta progression. Where Spelunky, for example, has 0 meta progression and players improvements is 100% knowledge and execution, Ball X Pit sits comfortably on the opposite end. I haven't died to a boss in this game once, every death was a result of my stats not being good enough and being overwhelmed by the "damage check" horde that comes before every single boss. Because there's nothing to learn and no impactful way to apply that knowledge. This leads to a largely unsatisfying meta progression where the numbers just go up. I'm on New Game + now and the game is still way to easy, but maybe that will change. From what I can tell so far NG+ is just "enemies have more health and damage". There's no rarity scaling. From what I can tell, every ball and every passive have the same drop chance. There're no balls or passives that are less common, but more impactful. This results in pretty much every run feeling and playing out the same. There's no oh shit moments and barely any satisfying power spikes. You just kind of always find what you need and are always able to put together a strong build that linearly scales in power until the level ends. No substantial variety in level and enemy design. After a couple of levels, you'll notice that the enemies get more complicated. In the show area some enemies are shielded from one side, the desert enemies shuffle around horizontally, messing up your aim. Soon this stops. None of these mechanics are ever combined or expanded upon to give the runs more depth. All the levels are equally wide and square, a simple addition of differently shaped levels would have already had a large impact on gameplay where bouncing balls of walls is the core gameplay mechanic! The city building mechanic is too easy. I felt like I was barely putting any effort into min-maxing the city layout and I was able to purchase upgrades the moment it was unlocked. I had an abundance of all resources and blasted through the game, dying only a handful of times (once again, none of those handful deaths were to a boss). Perhaps these "flaws" are features, and I'm just wishing for a different game. Perhaps all of this is by design to create a "purer" experience, that starts to resemble and auto clicker more than an actual game at later points. Hell, there's even a character that plays itself, so you can leave it running in the background for 15 minutes and go do something else. However, I think it's ultimately a pitty that the game such great foundation, that was just lacking a little bit of sauce to spice it up.