Just when you think 2025 hasn’t had enough great games to fill your time, another bounces into the chat.

In case you haven’t already played the excellent – and very generous – demo, Ball x Pit is a banger. One of the more interesting takes on the bullet hell / survivor space out there and infinitely, ridiculously replayable. Seriously, it’s been hard to play my other games for review because of how compelling this is.

And the good news is if you did play the demo, the full game has a lot more in it and some really interesting gameplay twists I did not see coming.

So, fundamentally, Ball x Pit is like the classic brick / ball breaker style games, played isometrically, where you control a little dude at the bottom of your screen, firing their unique ball at waves and waves of enemies coming down towards you. You’re going up, they’re coming down. Meaning there’s also a little bit of inspiration from the likes of Space Invaders there, too.

But the way the playspace is set up also makes it feel like you’re inside a pinball table. So while you’re ultimately aiming the ball at the enemies coming towards you, you’ll also find the balls can ricochet off the walls – and other enemies – and start ping ponging around the screen at a rapid rate. Before long, you’ll find yourself doing trick shots to try and get the balls behind your enemies, so you’re taking out the back wave as well as the mid-riff (raff).

Each area is set up into three stages – usually guarded by a sub-boss – and upon completion of that, you’ll actually see the playspace increase outwards, meaning you’ll get more and more enemies coming towards you and eventually the big bad of the biome.

That, in of itself, might be compelling to some, as you pick up XP gems from the ground and level up various run-specific attributes, like increased ball damage, damage resistance for your character, poison balls, fire balls, environmental effects and more.

And with different characters gradually unlocked over the course of the game – some fire one at a time, some fire in two different directions, one even has a protective stone wall for front line defense – with different enemies in each biome, there’s hours of entertainment alone in the core loop. But Ball x Pit has an additional element which adds to its intrigue. Base-building.

It seems to be something of a passion project for the game’s creator, Kenny Sun, who also experimented with something similar in his previous game, Mr Sun’s Hatbox. After each run, you’re taken to a small patch of land – reached by your ever-descending lift as you progress through Biomes – and eventually you’ll be able to grow and expand your patch of land using gold you collect, but also place down fields, trees and stone, to help you build more and more buildings as you keep progressing through the game.

During each level, you’ll find a handful of blueprints, which can then be taken back to your base and built out – providing you have the right resources – and these help influence the game in different ways. Certain buildings, for instance, unlock new characters, which really affects the dynamic of play as mentioned above, but you can also build monuments for completing certain levels and also to help gathering.

So there’s a sort of sub-mini game in this base bulding where you essentially cultivate the land but also you fire a group of people / balls off at a certain trajectory and get them to gather your resources for you. This is a cute little idea that sort of creates a bit of pot luck as to what you’re going to gather based on where you fire. But it does have some drawbacks.

You can only really fire your character from a small area and as your land grows, it gets harder and harder for them to reach those areas towards the top rung until later in the game. And of course by firing off at a certain trajectory, the likelihood is you’ll keep veering towards the same places. This also affects building development as just because you have the blueprint and resources you need, you’ll then need to ‘hit’ the building enough times with your person in order to build it.

This can be mitigated a little bit as you can move tiles around and slot them into certain places on the grid, meaning you can place them closer to you in ordert to make it easier to hit, but as mentioned, the more you grow, the harder it is to put the things you need where you want them too.

It also doesn’t help that you can only Harvest once a time in-between runs. You can increase the time you harvest eventually as you build up and again, certain upgrades deep into the game can also help your progress substantially, but for the first part of the game, this section does feel a bit gachamachine like in its randomness and is clearly pushing you towards going back onto more and more runs to get the elements you need in order to really make best use of the land.

Oddly, you can also be quite shortchanged by certain resources, by having lots of one and not enough of the one you need – again, hugely dependent on the trajectory of your harvesting. But when you see the area grow outward and you really begin to see the impact of your buildings, adding more permanent upgrades, giving you new characters, you’ll find yourself spending more and more time strategically placing buildings and really wanting to maximise your time on this screen. You can even upgrade certain tiles to really enhance the benefits offered.

But yes, runs are where the action happens and as expected, the first level will take some beating due to getting to grips with the game, understanding placement and as your character levels. You may even find you haven’t even unlocked your preferred character yet, which makes the journey all the harder. And to be fair, the balance on unlocking biomes once past the first hurdle does still represent a decent challenge.

It definitely gets easier, though, especially when you unlock the Matchmaker which lets you bring two characters into the fray at once, enabling you to use both their skills at once. Though I’d even go as far as to say some biomes are just not possible without that upgrade.

And that is something I definitely found with Ball x Pit as I continued – the game became a bit grindy as it progressed. Some enemies – outside of bosses – didn’t feel hugely different, there was just more of them. There weren’t many environment impacts in the game outside of aesthetical changes, and progression onto the next biome generally requires you to beat a level at least twice, forcing you to replay content. Not a big issue, but definitely frustrating and impedes that sense of progression somewhat as you move through the game at pace. Some enemies are also extremely tanky, which can make it a bit of a slog to work through the lines.

But just like its demo, Ball x Pit is heavily generous in content, with the blueprints offering some interesting new ways to play and there being eight default biomes to work through with enough differences throughout that will keep you playing. Ultimately, that’s in big thanks to the game’s core loop which is just so damn satisfying and compelling. Watching balls bounce around the screen in such chaotic fashion, building up and up as you go, just never got old and kept me going for five, six, seven more runs longer than I’d had planned. You’ll have dozens of balls firing off at once, alongside lasers going up and down the grid, earthquakes and lightning strikes, and even different ball types. Beautiful chaos!

And this is without even mentioning the fission, fusion and evolutional element of the game which enhances this even further. Upon gathering little rainbow coloured pickups, you’ll enter a screen whereby you can get extra, additional level ups on certain balls and pickups you’ve gathered, but you can also fuse some together to get unique, unexpected combinations. You can even evolve those combinations again into something all powerful and destructive, and if you find the right combination for the right biome, you’ll be melting through enemies in no time.

For me, this is where the system really starts to show its progression in how you experiment with it, the vast amount of combinations available to you and seeing intended results really blast through enemies at a rapid, destructive pace. It looks and feels good, though you can hit a bit of a ceiling quickly sometimes in some biomes and absolutely obliterate others, so there is some imbalance at times.

But damn if I don’t love this game and for the price, it’s an absolute steal for what you’re getting and how long you’ll likely find yourself playing it. The music is more often than not a suitably brilliant arcade bop, the action is fast, furious and stable. Even going right close up on the base screen to see the detail in some of the buildings throuhg the art style is genuinely stunning and surprising.

And in case you had any concerns, the game ran like a dream on my ROG Ally. Even on the lowest setting, the game was smooth as butter and wonderfully optimised, and this one definitely feels like it’s better played in your hands.

Ball x Pit is a must play if you’ve loved any of its inspirations, you’ve ever dabbled into the likes of Vampire Survivors or you just want some satisfyingly fun gameplay that somehow, despite many, many times of playing, just doesn’t really seem to get old.

Verdict

Ball x Pit is a thrillride from start to finish, from the rapid trajectory of a seemingly endless amount of deadly bouncing balls, to the huge variety available in evolutions and fusions, to the large amount of biomes and content and the base-building component alongside, it really is a total package. Access to later content definitely feels a bit grindy and enemies can be quite tanky and frustrating to defeat at times, and there’s some questions about the balancing between certain biomes, but these issues don’t stop you having far too much fun for far longer than you ever dared imagine. Another must-play has entered the chat for 2025!

Ball X Pit is out now on PC, Xbox Game Pass, and Switch 2

Played on PC / ROG Ally

Code kindly provided by Devolver for review purposes