Hands on with BALLxPit - Preview
When I first learned about BALLxPIT, based on the limited details, I just assumed that it was a Peggle style of game, but played from the bottom instead of the top. Instead, what I discovered upon playing it, was that the game was a modern take on Breakout formula, but instead of coloured bricks, its hordes of the undead. Even thought it was not the same gameplay I was predicting it to be, it was still insanely fun and I just kept going back for more.
There are two parts to the game, the obvious one is the breakout style gameplay and the second is more akin to a city builder. The latter is important, but I will stick with the more action focused section. As you start your run a few enemies will be dropped down ahead of you, and then you need to shoot your primary attack at them, the further up the field of play you make it, stronger and more numerous enemies will join the battle. If you are unable to take down those enemies that get to close to you, they will attack causing you some damage, take to much and you will fall in battle. As you take down enemies though, they will drop gems, collect enough and you level up and apart from an increase to a random stat, you will also be given the chance to select from a powerup, and then you keep pushing forward.
What makes the gameplay so addictive is that the powerups fall into two groups, attack and defend; there could be proper names but that is what I am going with. Those power ups that attack give you boosts to the damage your ball can do, lay down area of effect attacks and even stack damage boosts. The defend power ups give you damage protection, higher move speed and more, all designed to help you avoid any attacks made by the enemies. While there are a selection provided upon a level up, you can re-roll the offers for a few coins, if nothing appeals to you. But you need to be aware, there are only a finite number of slots for each group, so if you have used all those slots for attacks, but then get something good later on, you are out of luck. Or are you?
Some enemies and the bosses that you fight, will often drop fusion items, which offer a range of options, depending on what you have obtained so far. The common option is the ability for the fusion to spawn extra levels for your items, so if you have a level 1 attack option, it might drop two more tiers, giving you an extra boost in power. If you have no real space to level up anything, you can still choose it, but the better option is the fusion function. If you judged by the name that it fuses two attacks together then congratulations, because that is exactly what it does. You can choose the two attacks you want to combine, which generally buffs their damage and if they have an AOE impact, boosts that as well. It also opens up a slot for you to choose a new option the next time you level up. All of this happens with all the characters, but each character has their own unique ability, the upgrades can significantly impact how easy or hard it is to progress.
A successful run with a character gives you more supplies back at your camp, but even a failed run can help. In the demo the town building was limited to only a few slots, but there were still somethings I could do. The biggest thing you need are wheat and wood, thankfully both are easy to grow, where the challenge comes in is collecting them. In order to collect you must send your person out and they run around like the balls you shoot, bouncing off a few walls. Once they have been bounced around one time, you can’t do it again until you have attempted another run. If you have one person or more, it does not matter, once bounce between runs is all you get and eventually you get buildings, which impact their ability to run around. Those buildings also need you to bounce people off of them a few times, in order to construct them. If I am being honest, this was the part of the demo that I spent the least amount of time with, simply because it was limited, once I unlocked the characters, I just kept jumping back into the abyss for another run.
BALLxPIT is one of those games that just makes sense, once you play it and it does a great job of taking a game genre that has not been touched in a number of years and makes something special form it. There are of course countless more things for me to discover once the full game is released, such as more realms to run through, but for now, this is one ball pit I would not mind shouting bazinga in a few more times.
