Ball x Pit

[h3]tl;dr: Fun at first! But I feel it naturally led me to play it a lot/infinitely whilst lacking depth or involved gameplay after a bit, so I ended up spending a lot of time in the game doing nothing fun/involved anymore.[/h3] [hr][/hr] It's not bad and it does in fact offer value and fun, however I honestly can't say I would recommend the game to people (after playing it for some 80 hours). Some context: I have not played many games that have 'rogue-like' qualities where you repeatedly play levels where you keep dying but make progress gradually, have a bunch of characters w/ their own qualities to choose from, select "upgrades"/"weapons"/"passives" during any specific 'run' which will lead to that run being unique and offering varied gameplay by having fun and interesting mechanics (+ the dopamine of the chance to get the thing you want most loll). Except for some 40 hours of vampire survivors prior to this. When I played vampire survivors I eventually got frustrated with the game for simply not being interactive enough at any given moment and just lacking any type of depth in the moment to moment gameplay because you tend to kinda just be walking around, "spacing yourself around enemies safely", and picking up the gems. With the real gameplay being in choosing what upgrades you want when leveling up, ((although if you want a specific setup I think it was possible to just get that exact setup you had in mind, and if you couldn't due to rng it would be frustrating)). So a run would feel a bit like doing nothing waiting for the moments to choose the upgrades you already planned out before starting it, without anything substantial to do during the run kinda. When I started playing this game, ballxpit, I was having a lot of fun and thought it was quite good and exactly what I was looking for: a game with similar satisfaction like in Vampire Survivors, but with way more involved moment to moment gameplay! For the first 20 hours the game was fun to play! However with the permanent upgrades you get while playing the game, eventually the levels just get easier and easier to complete with you doing less and less of pretty much anything whilst playing through the level aside from just choosing the upgrades you want when leveling up. I did however feel compelled to play this game a lot for some reason the last couple of weeks/last month and just felt tempted to go further, make crazy builds that could go on infintely, see if I can get a good score on the leaderboard, and ticking off boxes with the achievements in-game and on steam. I think the game is designed in a way where doing all of these things is something you might want to do. The thing with this game is that it has a curve to it where it was challenging and fun at first (5/10hours), then you kept getting upgrades but also kept progressing to harder levels (20/25 hours), but then it slowly loses any challenge and has you coming back to waste time and feel dopamine for the special effects and the idea of getting achievements or something (30/35+ hours). So the reason I wouldnt recommend it is because I think I myself have had an experience with the game where I funneled myself into permanently overlevelling and grinding levels at the highest speed in infinite mode where overall for many hours I have been doing barely anything fun and was participating in the activity purely for the dopamine of some superficially satisfying elements, which can be a bit addictive (in a bad way). These are some potential updates I think would mitigate/remove some of my issues with the game though! :[list] [*] in the infinite mode the speed maybe ramps up (exponentially?) [*] allow for the levels themselves to be played at a way higher game speed [*] allow you to turn off/on the permanent buffs in some type of menu (like in vampire survivors :steamhappy: ) [*] remove small bits of inactive time as those get super annoying over large amount of time. I'm referring to having to click what resource to get a bit of for every single level infinitely in the infinite level mode after not being able to level any ball nor passives so you have to annoyingly select the gold one for 100s of times instead of allowing you to automate that decision, also the rainbow ball fusion thingy where you can select fusions and evolutions from it is seriously super annoying in the infinite mode to choose the one and only singular option manually every single time, also make resetting a run faster to input like lets say you pause with esc to then reset instantly by going shift + r or something, and also make it possible to insta skip the farming animation as even sped up it takes too long for something you might see 100s of times. [/list] Thanks for reading my review and hats off to the creator(s) of this game for making something original and fun despite the issues I have laid out.