Ball x Pit - Sphere Itself (Review)
- James Stephanie Sterling
- 56m
- 8 min read
Ball x Pit
Released: October 15th, 2025
Developer: Kenny Sun
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Systems: PC, PS5, Switch, Xbox Series X/S
Mate, Ball x Pit is fucking fantastic!
Few games could speak to me as intensely as one that infuses a block breaker game with survive ‘em up elements, a dash of pinball, and a cute city builder for the heck of it. I’ve been hooked on this thing a major amount, its components complimenting each other in such a way as to utterly drag me into its loop.
The premise is straightforward enough - monsters meander their way down a playfield, Space Invaders style, and you bowl your balls at them to deal damage. Offense combines Baby Balls and Special Balls, the former providing minor consistent attacks and the latter being your main source of damage. Special Balls arrive in roguelite fashion, offered and upgraded when leveling up.
There’s a hefty assortment of Special Balls with unique properties - area damage, status effects, splitting apart, etcetera. From burning Fire Balls to heavy Iron Balls to incorporeal Ghost Balls, each one is cool enough on its own, but there’s more to them. Once fully upgraded, they can be combined in one of two ways, synergizing their effects and forming the basis of a run-killing build.
Fission pickups periodically drop throughout a stage. They randomly award multiple upgrades or, if enough Special Balls qualify, provide the opportunity to use either Fusion or Evolution. Fusing balls does just that - two Specials are combined to roll their abilities into one, so a Freeze Ball and a Bleed Ball will, unsurprisingly, freeze enemies and inflict the bleeding status.
When combining two Specials via Evolution, you get new balls with powerfully altered behaviors. If you Evolve the Dark Ball (deals one powerful shot on a cooldown) with a Poison Ball (guess), you’ll get the Virus Ball which inflicts Disease, a unique spreadable form of the poison effect. Because it’s a separate status, you can still stack regular poison damage and radiation effects from a combining of Poison and Laser Balls. Lovely.
As another example, Vampire and Bleed creates Leech, which attaches a parasite to enemies that adds continuous bleeding stacks and includes Vampire’s healing properties in the process.
While every Special Ball can be Fused, only specifically compatible ones can Evolve, and figuring those synergies out is part of the fun. Taking it a step further, an Evolved ball can itself be upgraded and Fused, tacking on even more abilities. Some balls work really well as Fusions, such as Cell or Egg Sac, as they can field multiple balls with the effects of whatever they’re glued to.
There are even some very rare instances where Evolved Balls can synergize with something else to create another Evolution. These are particularly tough to figure out.
As you might expect, this all makes for a ton of combinations. I love not just the depth but the sheer imagination of the system. On a meta level, I enjoyed trying to deduce what might Evolve based on the components, such as logically figuring that Fire and Light would make a Sun Ball. There’s a lovely suite of weapons that can of course lead to screen-filling chaos as you unlock more stuff.
Leveling up also offers Passive upgrades as well as Special Balls, which can affect critical damage, enhance Baby Balls, or grant more exotic things such as Stone Warriors that march up the playfield and attack monsters. Some of these Passives can themselves Evolve with each other, though this is a real rarity.
You can manually or automatically shoot balls, and you can catch them as they bounce back or let them return to you upon hitting the bottom of the screen. While using autofire sacrifices a level of tactical control, I found it much easier to concentrate on enemies, hostile projectiles, XP gems, and aiming. The other drawback is that shooting slows your movement speed, which I’m not fond of as a mechanic but did get used to.
Stages scroll the player forward at a set pace, with
three boss encounters arriving at specific times. A typical run lasts between fifteen and twenty minutes, which keeps them fairly breezy, and the timed structure gives them a nice rhythm.
The gameplay fundamentals delight me as a fan of all the genres being incorporated. Alongside being a big enough fan of pinball to own several tables, I’ve always had a lot of time for a good block breaker game. Combining those with the dopamine hit of Survivor-style gameplay is inspired.
I’ve very few issues with how the game works. As well as the slowdown while shooting, I feel like trying to catch a ball before it hits the back is harder than it should be. Even with an upgraded magnetism stat, it can be a frustration to try and nab them with my tiny hitbox and I’ve mostly stopped bothering even though it means I can’t attack quite as frequently.
At times, the shortness of a stage can leave one feeling edged, so the speak. All too often I’ll be an Evolution away from turning my great build into a sublime one, only to realize the end boss is approaching and I’ll be getting no more Fissions. Having one more drop before the boss would be perfect, but that’s a mere preference - the fact I can’t always perfect my loadout is far from a dealbreaker.
Ball x Pit is a real hard bastard when starting out. My first run ended in an ignominious three minutes after the encroaching skeletons overwhelmed me. The early runs, as well as first attempts at some of the later stages, can be quite stressful experiences as enemies steadily drop in and potentially outpace your ability to take them down.
Funnily enough, basic mobs are usually a far bigger threat than bosses. Bosses might be tanky and often spew projectiles but they aren’t a dozen enemies forming a thick wall of incoming damage. I don’t mind the balance too much, but it’s rather amusing that I’ve regularly greeted the end boss of a stage with a sigh of relief since its arrival breaks that aforementioned wall.
You’ll start out with space for three Special Balls and three Passives. That’s enough to get some Evolutions going, and really that’s the key to success. Fusions add flexibility and Passives are useful, but Evolutions do the heavy lifting and are essential to success. With a good deal of time investment, you’ll eventually unlock space for five balls, by which point you’ll build some wonderfully broken combinations.
Acquiring permanent enhancements is a game in its own right. The time between stages is spent with an adorable little city builder where you place harvestable resources and building facilities that will confer all sorts of benefits. In keeping with the game’s spherical inclinations, it’s not as simple as just plonking down your wheat fields and buildings - in keeping with the spherical theme, you have to arrange them with bouncy fun in mind.
In order to gather resources and construct your facilities, you need to use the Harvest command to call the citizens, fix their trajectory, and then watch as they bounce around your city’s layout, pinball style. They gather building materials by touching forests and mines and such, and add to a facility’s construction meter whenever one of them bounces off one.
Immensely satisfying stuff. It hits the brain chemicals just right when you’ve unlocked enough characters, all of whom bounce around and confer their own targeting bonuses such as increased speed, extra resources, or an extension to the harvesting timer. Holding a button to fast-forward the process only makes it more enjoyable. It’s a lot of good boingy-boing.
Facilities will not just improve stats, they’ll grant item rerolls, gear slots, and other advantages that’ll end up having a huge impact on your success rate. Blueprints for houses are especially notable, as they’re used to unlock the characters inhabiting them.
Ball x Pit’s two halves are dangerously effective at keeping a player engrossed. They feed each other so well, the stages giving you ample reason to support them with buildings and the city builder giving you new things to try in stages. They both benefit and depend on one another, creating a cycle that I found hard to break away from. I’m so glad it’s not a monetized loop - this game’s features could so easily be used for evil.
Right, so we need to talk about the characters, because they’re some of the most weird and wonderful playable options a game of this nature has seen. By the time you’ve got over half the roster, you’ll have encountered ways to play this game that completely change it.
You’ll unlock over a dozen little guys as you progress, each one possessing a fixed Starter Ball, bespoke stats, and a house that’ll add their own benefits to the city. Things start simple enough - you begin with a basic Warrior who has a Bleed Ball and no other gimmicks, then you’ll find Achy Finger, a Fire Ball user who moves without a firing penalty. Not long after that comes characters like The Embedded, whose every shot passes through enemies as if it were a Ghost Ball unless it hits a wall.
Things get weirder when you encounter the Cohabitants, whose dual character models each fire a copy of the same ball that deals half damage. Then there’s the Shade, with balls that fire not from the character but the very top of the screen and deal extra backstab damage. The Jester, meanwhile, can bounce their balls overhead to hit any part of the field.
Playstyles such as these are mechanically interesting, but they’re not as big a change as the Cogitator, who picks all his upgrades himself, or the Shieldbearer, whose wide bouncy shield approximates a traditional block breaker experience. The Tactician really takes the cake, however - his brilliant thinking skills are represented by the gameplay becoming fucking turn-based!
Oh, and at some point you’ll be able to take two characters at once, combining their abilities, because of course you can!
I love the ways in which Ball x Pit mucks around with its own mechanics. It would’ve been easy to just give use conventional modifiers and nobody would have felt like anything was missing, but instead the creativity’s let absolutely loose. They’re not all winners - the aforementioned Cogitator isn’t exactly exciting even if he might discover some new Evolutions for you - but there are so many that you’ll find plenty to like.
That said, the game does want you to use them all. Not only can you get stat increases every time you repeat a level with a new pick, you have to do this to progress the game, each subsequent stage requiring an increasing number of reruns to unlock. This isn’t a detriment exactly, since replaying stages is part and parcel of a Survive ‘em Up, but the widening requirements start to feel a little like padding later on.
Even with its magnetic loop, fatigue can set in when running through stages many times over, especially if you start going for a 100% completion rate. Then again, considering part of me bemoans the lack of an endless mode, I can’t claim the fatigue is particularly strong.
Ball x Pit’s visual style takes some getting to. The design is great but I dislike the retro filter and general jagginess. There’s something I find a touch unpleasant about the playable characters’ in-game models and weird perspective juxtaposed against some terrific enemies and bosses. The mobs are really well designed and look adorable in their little square pots.
Audiovisuals for the Fission menu are vividly enjoyable, the city design is really cute, and I dig the various Special Balls’ aesthetics. The soundtrack is understated but pleasant, with the music for the Fungal Forest and its boss especially standing out.
Did I mention I really enjoy this game, by the way?
I’m someone who has a lot of fun playing with balls, so you can take it as high praise when I say Ball x Pit’s been some of the best fun I’ve had with a handful of orbs this year. Combining a block breaker with a survive ‘em up is brilliant, the pinball city building is a giggle, and the inventiveness that runs throughout the entire production is utterly brilliant.
It’s a whole load of balls and I love it.
9.5/10
