It’s always hard to criticize a game made by one person. You’re essentially criticizing their life’s work. I’ve had small teams reach out to me after a bad review and – I’m sorry I didn’t love your game. It was an impressive feat nonetheless.
Ball x Pit is like Space Invaders, but instead of shots you have balls that bounces and instead of five rows of aliens you have more and more enemies coming in. You get special balls with different abilities and you get to combine balls into new balls, evolving new balls with new abilities to take on the horde. You also have up to 16 heroes each having their own specialities and unique ways to shoot balls. All this combines, makes no round in Ball x Pit the same.
In the game you’re unlocking blue prints for houses and when you’re not in the arena, you’re outside, building a city. Each house brings upgrades to the game in the arena and every house is also upgradable. You have resources like gold, wood, crop and stone to buy and upgrade these houses, but it’s never really any choice of what house to buy, because you’ll end up with all of them upgraded to the max anyway.
The game is entertaining the way an arcade bullet hell game is. With all the upgrades and combinations of balls it doesn’t get as monotonous as it should be. It is very satisfying when you find a stellar combination of balls that makes the whole screen light up like a Christmas tree from enemies taking damage, and when you roll out damage numbers in the thousands. That’s really neat.
Ball x Pit has 8 levels. You need to complete each level 2-5 times with different characters before you can proceed to the next level. The last level you need to finish 8 times before you’ve completed the game. This makes for a minimum of 30 rounds to finish the game, if you manage to win all the rounds. You won’t so expect about 60 rounds each 15 minutes long. This makes the game at least 15 hours long. I think this is the main problem. The game is way too long.
Each level is the same. Two mini bosses and one end boss. The mini bosses are just bigger and stronger normal enemies and the end bosses are not that inspiring either. They shoot tons of projectiles and sometimes rushes towards you. The different levels aren’t that much different either. You get enemies in a slightly different hue with more health but the strategy doesn’t shift. You can do the same thing through the whole game.
The city building is not very fun. I see why it’s there but it is not something I look forward to between my bouts in the arena.
I also had some technical difficulties on Nintendo Switch 2 where the game crashed on me several times. Also playing on the handheld screen gave me headaches repeatedly, from the constant blinking lights when hitting the enemies with balls. It was fine on the big TV though.
I rate this game as GOOD.
Replay 