I was really late to the Vampire Survivors party. By the time I discovered it, it was old news. If you haven’t played it, it’s a top down APRG where your character auto-shoots. All you do is steer around. You level up quickly and as you do you get a choice of power-ups to choose from and in so doing put together a build for that run. When you die, you hit a store to buy upgrades to make you stronger, then you try again. It doesn’t sound like much, but the sheer number of enemies on screen, each of which drops a bit of exp when they die, make it like a constant dopamine drip.

Anyway, now we have Ball X Pit which is scratching the same kind of itch. This time the gameplay feels like the love-child of Vampire Survivors and Breakout. The main gameplay has you in a tall narrow corridor with enemies marching down the screen from the top while you fire balls at them to destroy them. Both enemies and you have a health pool and generally one hit from a ball isn’t enough to destroy a baddie. If the bad guys reach the bottom of the screen they smack you for a chunk of your health, and some fire arrows or other projectiles at you as them make their way down the screen.

Meanwhile the balls you fire bounce around like they do in Breakout, the major difference being that you can aim them fairly precisely, and if you want you can hold them and then fire. There’s also an “auto-fire” mode that makes it a lot more Vampire Survivor-ish and it is how I usually play. But just like in Breakout if you can sneak a ball to the back of the enemies it will careen around and hit a ton of bad guys, doing a lot of damage.

I feel like a video will be a better explainer than I ever will be:

There are different kinds of Balls. Hero balls, and baby balls. Baby balls are weaker little projectiles that you don’t really control. Hero Balls come in a number of flavors. Fire balls cause enemies to burn for a bit (doing DoT). Earthquake balls cause area damage. Vampire balls heal you when they kill an enemy. And so on. You can hold 4 types of Hero Balls at once, and 4 passive powerups that offer bonuses like faster movement or enhanced damage when you hit an enemy from behind.

As in VS, every enemy leaves a gem which gives you experience. You have a variety of stats (Strength, Intelligence, Dexterity) and when you level up one or more of those get bumped up a point or two, and you get to pick a ball or a passive to add to your quiver or level up. Every so often (haven’t figured out what triggers these) you’ll get a little glowy thing spawning. When you pick one of those up you get some boon. Sometimes it’s random level ups for your existing skills, and sometimes it’s the chance to combine Balls into something new. So maybe you fuse a Fire ball with a Vampire ball and you get, well, a Fire X Vampire ball that both burns and returns health, and when these two fuse you now have an open slot to add something new.

Anyway eventually you die or beat the boss which ends a level. Then you go to your village. Here you can spend your rewards to buy farms and buildings and so on. Farms (wheat, forest, stone) just give more resources to buy more buildings. Houses (which you need to find a blueprint for in the ball-busting part of the game) unlock new characters, and combat buildings (eg Barracks) make your characters start the next run stronger.

But even in your village the ball motif continues. Once you place your farms and buildings and such, you have to aim and fire your characters at them in order to collect, and these characters bounce off things like your balls do. To build a building you have to hit it x times (5 maybe? I never counted). To harvest a farm  you have to fire a worker over it. And so on. Once you’ve built and harvested, it’s back to the pit for another run.

Here is what that looks like: