What if Arkanoid was Vampire Survivors? Well, you’d (sort of) have Ball X Pit. Instead of a bat, you have a person who throws balls to destroy enemies, which are essentially blocks, that move slowly towards you. You can gain XP from gems dropped by defeated baddies, as per Survivors games, and levelling up lets you choose a number of upgrades for your balls – such as balls that set things on fire or cause area damage like earthquakes.
Eventually, you get the chance to combine ball powers, so you can have a laser which hits all blocks in a column but also poisons them, or balls that can pass through blocks but also freezes them for a few seconds. You also get passive power-ups like increasing the damage to blocks from behind, or increasing the chance you’ll dodge an attack, and often these too can be combined.
As well as XP as you play each run to level you up for run itself, you also gain another XP type which gives permanent bonuses, and gold to buy things. Outside of the runs there’s a sort of farming game, where you buy land and buildings, plant crops, and then use all the characters you’ve unblocked as balls to bounce off everything to build the buildings and harvest the crops. Crops (grain, wood and stone) unlock and pay for additional buildings, and these building add extra bonuses to your characters, like faster movement or more HP.
Each character has its own quirks and runs can play out very differently as a result. Firstly, they all start with a different type of special ball, but then they have features like balls being launched from the back of the field instead of the front, or all balls pass through blocks or something. Later in the game you get the ability to take two characters into a run together, and that sort of amalgamates their abilities, further altering how the run plays out.
You can’t just stick to your favourite characters either, as in order to unlock the next level you have to complete the previous one a number of times with different characters. At first I hated this, as I thought I’d found the “best” character and wanted to stick with them, but it forced me to play differently and, actually, most of them have merit.
To complete the game, you have to have a number of successful runs on each level (with, as I said, a range of characters), and I did that. It unlocks a sort of NewGame+ which is really just an extra difficulty for each level you can choose. I’ve played quite a bit of that too, but it doesn’t really add anything to what is an already excellent game. Addictive Survivors gameplay loop and a surprising amount of variety add up to a must-buy title.
