If you’re anything like me, a Gen Z caffeine addict with the attention span of a fruit fly, ancient classics like Pong and Breakout don’t do much for you. ‘How am I supposed to play this without roguelite elements and heaps of stacking upgrades?’ I cry, and if the lesson is that sometimes less is more, an hour with Ball X Pit has made sure I may never learn it. Sometimes more is more, and it rules.
Devolver dedicated its Summer Game Fest show to Ball X Pit, a brick-breaker turbocharged with new twists, and I was able to try a demo of it before the reveal.
Skeleton soldiers in the form of blocks and rectangles march down a vertical column trying to shoot you and reach the bottom, while you run around automatically firing balls which bounce around and deal damage. If you catch the balls mid-flight, they immediately shoot out wherever you’re aiming. There’s already some depth there: you can aim wide to take down a whole group with ricochets, or get up in an enemy’s face and rapidly bat the ball back at them to focus one down.
The fun really starts, though, when you start leveling up and racking up special balls. Between a broodmother ball that “births” more balls as it flies around, a burn ball that lights enemies ablaze, and a midnight oil ball that turns burning enemies into living bombs, and all sorts of colorful alternatives, Ball X Pit goes from stark simple to nigh-unreadable chaos in a matter of minutes.
Each special ball gets added to your arsenal and comes with its own suite of upgrades and potential fusions with other special balls; before long, you’re making split-second decisions in a sea of automatic laser fire and screen-coating explosions. Boss enemies will DPS check your build as the skeleton hordes get tougher and more numerous, and I was constantly itching to level up just one more time, get a little bit stronger, so I could live a few dozen seconds longer.
In-between runs, you hurry back to New Ballbylon (yes, really) and spend whatever cash you earned on the meta progression stuff. New buildings, new playable characters, new potential builds for future runs, and so on. The structure is nothing unusual, but I still walked away from the demo pretty taken with what I played—which speaks to the sheer, twitchy fun this game finds in its ball-bouncing brick breaking.
Frankly, I thought I was getting tired of the roguelike formula, and Ball X Pit packs in a lot of concepts you have seen before. But the action in its demo is so breakneck, such a potent distillation of that power-scaling madness I love in games like Risk of Rain, I came crawling back to the play button after seeing what the demo had to offer.
If you’re keen to check out Ball X Pit, you can wishlist it or play the demo on Steam.
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