Ball x Pit: What Real Players Say After the Hype

There have been five answers to Balatro in the past ten months. None of them have been the answer to Balatro.

I had a good time with it, but it turned into an idle game in late/post game. I would need a pretty compelling reason to ever boot it back up.

I almost like the building and meta progression more than the actual game itself. I think this game would be way too vanilla without it

Will they fuck off with the balatro comparison? This game has nothing to do with it, it's just for marketing. Also great game.

We're in the midst of a golden age of indie games. Just hit after hit.

I know not every game needs new content updates, but this is a game that will really benefit from them. I started to get bit bored of the same combinations of balls by the end of my first playthrough.

It's always the games I had never heard of that ended being my games of the year. This shit is really good and really addictive. Feels like a breath of fresh air in a crowded genre.

As someone with 20 hours on Steam Deck - this is a very fun game and very much worth the price!

It weirdly removed the actual gameplay from itself, so maybe these updates will undo or sidestep some of that.

I initially thought the same but I quickly found that there's not really any actual base building elements, despite the appearance. It feels more like a reskinned skill tree combined with some inventory management. After the first few hours, harvesting resources becomes mostly, if not completely, automated.

There's no answer to Balatro, only acceptance of Balatro as our guide and saviour.

There was a hype for this game but it's not that great as many say. Don't get me wrong, the game is good but there is not much going on after 4 or 5 hours. This game needs more content and gameplay overhaul. Levels feel same and enemies are not unique. Variety of weapons and mechanics feels lackluster. Most of the stats are just numbers without any flavor.

The game looks more bullet hell than it actually is: 95% of the projectiles on screen are your own, and catching them is actually ideal. Enemy projectiles are standardized in each level so it's much easier to see and dodge them. I'm also notoriously bad at Bullet Hell games and am having a fine time with this one.

Nearing the end of the game and while I really enjoy many of its systems, I just don't get that same sense of 'oomph' from balls, upgrades, and evolutions as I do in games such as TBOI and Gungeon. I never finish a round with any sense of a game-breaking loadout.

My biggest problem was the metagame town building stuff. It became a dumb chore because you could just suicide a run and then get another 'turn' of the town building phase and basically grind out anything you wanted. It just wasn't fun at all.

I like this game for being a pretty simple, largely stress-free roguelite. I can play it in little 15 minute work breaks, or at the end of my day as a relaxing kind of game where I can be creative with my builds but I am not up against super sweaty waves or bosses. Yeah, after you figure out a few ball combinations that absolutely melt everything the game becomes trivial but it's $15 and you can easily get 30 hours minimum just clearing all the stages and maxing everything.

Shit, I spent 4 hours on this game before I realized I was supposed to be asleep.

Early in the game, the most important thing is to just get levels on your characters and blueprints for buildings. Build the stat boost buildings, level them as fast as you can, and accept that you'll be rerunning those first few levels a good few times until you get some good support in place.

I agree, the concept is great but there is literally zero variety in the levels and enemies, which is a pity because the base gameplay is fun, the character variety is solid, and the town mini game is a great way to solve the metagame and leveling outside of runs.

I grew tired of the base building stuff by the second level. It felt tacked on and superfluous. The actual shooting ball gameplay is awesome and worth every penny.

I just started this game this weekend and am 8 hours in. It feels very okay. Most my runs feel too similar regardless of which characters I use.

I feel like its the BEST part. Give me all the meta progression baby

The base building is completely insignificant after a few hours, just 1-click and done. Move around a few houses every few runs, thats it. I think it is a funny mechanic but not of any importance. Overall the game is quite good but not very deep sadly. It is good fun for like 30 hours though.

I do think there's a lot of QoL upgrades that could happen to launch it in the stratosphere of greatness.

I bought this on a bunch of friends' recs last night but didn't play it, but maaaaan I can tell I'm going to go nuts on it this weekend.

I found the builds kind of mindless. After your town was sufficiently upgraded, the choices didn't matter. That's fine except prior to building up your town, some levels were unbeatable. So the town was more important than your build choices or skill in the actual game.

Love this game, I think it's genuinely pretty underrated because it looks like how 50% of the scam mobile games look but the gameplay is actually pretty fun and your strategy has to change up quite a bit depending on what kind of build you've gone for. The base building mechanics don't really click with me but I don't find that they're a very big part of the game. The actual runs are a blast though.

Yea once you're done chasing the high of unlocking balls and characters it's kind of stale. I think the problem is that it's pretty easy to build your runs. In Balatro for example there is zero guarantee you get whatever jokers you're looking for. Ball Pit, though, you start upgrading one ball and you are guaranteed to get that ball to level 3 for fusions and evolutions.

Good fun for 30 hours or so is perfect. I don't need a lifestyle for every damn game out there.

I'm about to finish the game and 100% the achievements. It was solid. I really enjoyed the demo because it felt like I couldn't out-level the difficulty. The full game got to a point pretty quickly where I didn't really have to pay attention to anything going on. It was fun while it lasted, but not anywhere near my favorite roguelites in terms of depth and fun.

Honestly my fav game of 2025. Not for longevity but just because I've wanted a better brick breaker game since I was 15. It does this and adds cosmic horror. It was perfect.

I'm having a blast so far, I sincerely hope this game gets a steady stream of content updates, more balls, combinations, more characters, stages. This game is extremely fun and could see myself wasting many hours like Vampire Survivors especially with a multitude of content.

I like it, but it's like two games in one basically. You like one of them and not the other. That's fair. I would not have enjoyed just doing the ball game over and over. I think it's cool how they impact each other.

The base building is super fun, I love problem solving to design a suitable layout that's both functional and aesthetically pleasing.

I've been playing this on PS5 and it's a lot of fun. I haven't beat it yet and it does get a little repetitive near end game but I do enjoy the variation of ball effects the most.

My biggest complaint about ball pit is that it felt like as long as you had all of your buildings maxed with the available upgrades, it was pretty hard to lose.

When in doubt pick lasers. They're probably the strongest non-evolution balls in the game. Vertical is better than horizontal in my opinion.

I'm happy with the game, but no mouse support for base building is an obvious missed opportunity.

I actually like the base building a lot but it can be improved upon HEAVILY. There's just way too many buildings where I have to sit there and hover over every single one just to find what they do or if they need an upgrade. Overall it's a good addition because it gives a nice strategy-ish element to what I think would be an otherwise kind of brainless game.

Wow the Switch 2 version is so much smoother than the Switch 1 version. The old version was moving in slow motion comparatively.

Something I love about it is the Fusion and Evolution mechanic. Evolving Wind + Fire, for instance, to create Firestorm then adding Lightning to it with Fusion to make it a big aoe that shocks enemies AND burns them is amazing. The amount of combinations you can make feels near limitless and experimenting every run is just great.

This game is INCREDIBLY good. The soundtrack, gameplay, the fuses and evolutions! You never know what you might get when fusing 2 different balls for the first time!

The base building has become my favorite part. I just do runs now so that I can upgrade my base.

I personally love it because if I was just doing the breakout ball game alone over and over I would get burned out much more quickly. It gives me a nice little break in between to refresh

I actually like the base building aspect. Like someone else said, it's more of a glorified skill tree than anything else, but for the time it asks you to put in you get quite a lot out of it. It reminds me of Loop Hero.

A lot of buildings (way too many for my taste), no way to track which ones are upgraded or aren't, need to move them constantly due to upgrades/new buildings that requires specific placements, a lot of them have synergies but no way to see which ones are affected by them. Game needs a massive UI update for the base building aspect. Base building aspect of this game is what makes it go from an 8 to a 6 for me.

It's a brilliant game. The switch 1 version runs near perfectly as well.

Insanely good game, I thought I was done with the vampire survivors sequel games but the gameplay in this one is awesome.

I was obsessed with this game for a solid week over the holidays while I was off from work. My PS5 says I spent 38 hours on it, which is an insane amount of time for me since I usually play for 1-2 hours a day during the rest of the year.

Got gamepass and a Xbox ally x and despite that I'll be buying it on switch 2, that's how great this game is. Devs deserve all the money and praise.