Some reasons why Ball X Pitt is great and others why it is not

I think that for the most part that this is a great game and that most people are going to get their $15 worth out of it, I know that I have up to this point anyway.   This isn’t to say that it is a perfect game though, it is really good and I have gotten a great many  hours out of it, certainly a lot more hours than I do for the buck in many of the games that I play, but after about 20 hours of playing this highly addictive….well...whatever you call it, I can say that it does have some shortcomings and one of the main ones is that it just isn’t very challenging.

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I don’t need a game to be difficult or easy:  I’m one of the many people that would like to see something in the middle.   I think this is part of the reason why I am a fan of traditional metroidvania games but am not necessarily a fan of *Silksong*, which I consider to be a great deal more difficult than I am willing to devote towards it.   

With Ball X Pitt the game has the illusion of difficulty but this is merely because you haven’t worked up your stats which is done in the town building portion of the game.   Once you do that, whatever it is that you previously thought was complicated or “too hard” all of a sudden becomes exceptionally easy.   

The choices you make for your upgrades when you are doing a particular run are relevant to success of course to some degree, but unlike other games that have rogue-like elements, they aren’t really all that essential.   If you aren’t offered a particular option that you would prefer early on, for example, it likely isn’t going to have that much of an impact on whether or not that run is successful.  

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<sub> he makes all the choices for you </sub> </center> 

I think the perfect example of this phenomenon would probably be this one particular character named “The Cogitator” that you get about 30% of the way through the game where one of his characteristics is that he makes all of these choices for you.  You do NOT get to choose what you want your upgrades or fusions or evolutions to be at all – the toon makes these choices for you.  Yet, I have never been on a run with this character where the choices that he made were some sort of detriment to my run at all.  Either you have the necessary stat powerups at that point or you don’t and if you don’t you will fail.

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<sub> If you do not have the appropriate powerups, no amount of "skill" is going to get you through this wave </sub> </center> 

Since there in only one way to really play this game and that is to fire as fast as you possibly can in a somewhat mostly upward fashion, choosing when to fire and when not to isn’t actually an option.  You almost certainly will be firing as rapidly as you possibly can all the time and this is why the option to do so is offered to you in the first few minutes of the “tutorial.”

So this is the only real downside of this game.   I feel as though it is a perfectly fine casual game but it is one where if you put in the time you are going to succeed.   Dodging enemy attacks are not difficult and if you lack the power output necessary to complete a certain section of the game no amount of running around and positioning your balls/bullets/skills in a certain direction is going to change that.  You simply will get defeated by overwhelming numbers of enemies.   On the flip side, if you return to a previous level with a character you already played what level with post-several-powerups, the run is going to be so easy to the point where it might actually be considered a bit boring.   

Basically, this game needs very little to no strategy in order to emerge victorious.  

Therefore, while I have had a good time with this one and the city-building aspect of it certain does mix up the gameplay a bit (I personally love city-building aspects in any game) it isn’t going to be enough to offer any sort of real challenge to gamers out there.   

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To put it bluntly, this game is something I am glad I bought, I have no ragrets... but I find myself doing more runs just so I can get new buildings in my city and runs at I cannot complete it is almost never a skill issue, it is just often mathematically impossible for you to overcome what is being thrown at you.   

It's still got a 1-hour free trial on many different services out there if you want to check it out.