I’ve decided to try and write more reviews of games in 2026, now that we’re back more or less in full swing, I want to return to acknowledging games I want to call out. We’re going to kick the year off with Kenny Sun’s Ball x Pit, a game that is the totally normal combination of Breakout, Vampire Survivors, and ActRaiser’s town building mode.
With its roguelike structure demanding “just one more round,” Ball x Pit cost me a lot of lost sleep the last two weeks. It’s broken up into two phases of play: the first is the Breakout or Arkanoid style of bouncing balls off enemies to destroy them as they slowly march down the field. Your character starts with a special ball and a handful of “baby balls” to auto-fire at the blocky baddies, and levels up quickly to boost stats and discover new balls. These balls can then be fused or evolved together into bigger and better balls, often until the final few minutes of a stage has devolved into a near-unreadable harvest of damage numbers appearing all over the screen. Pavlov and his dogs have nothing on Kenny Sun’s hold over his Ball x Pit players.
The second phase of the game is a town builder where you construct buildings from blueprints you find during the battles. Buildings grant you new characters and incremental stat or currency growth; if you’ve played a roguelike in the last decade it will all feel familiar. Funny enough, buildings need to be constructed before activating, which requires… shooting your collected characters at your town to bounce around like they’re balls themselves. You don’t do anything in Ball x Pit without shooting a ball at it.
The town builder, while integral to leveling up your characters and battle strategies overall, really plays second fiddle to the main game. It requires some micromanagement of building placement and character assignment that feels awkward and abrasive when juxtaposed to the chaos of dozens of balls careening around the screen during battles. It never felt wholly satisfying on its own. Returning to the House of Hades this is not.
But the true standout are the battlefields and characters, with each providing new and terrible ways to reap destruction. New characters that are unlocked initially allow you to fire faster or send your ball through enemies like a ghost, but later on some truly bizarre abilities are granted, such as sending your balls out in a spray or firing from the top of the screen. Combine this with pairing two characters together to merge their abilities, and Ball x Pit becomes the dopamine dripper it was dreamt to become.
The game’s music also pairs well with the flow of its stages, swelling to welcome bosses onscreen in their moment of glory. This isn’t a soundtrack I’d want to listen to on its own, but it meets the challenge of not disappearing behind dozens of disparate sound effects firing a second very well.
Ball x Pit is available on all the major platforms and while the town management can be clunky, it never gets in the way of the main star: busting up hundreds of enemies with your baby balls.
