When BALL x PIT released last year, it instantly hooked me. The marriage of roguelite ball-shooting mechanics and city-building was a match made in heaven. I found myself equally driven to tackle great runs, experimenting with and leveling up a diverse cast of characters, ball types, and playstyles, and to max out my city and its harvests. Now, with the release of the Risen Ballbylon expansion, my free time has once again been happily overtaken by the frantic shooting of balls.
Expanding the Arsenal
The expansion introduces eight new characters that gently shake up the gameplay. While some stick to familiar mechanics like shooting at specific angles or altering trajectories, others lean into a more aggressive, up-close-and-personal style. For instance, one character relies entirely on area-of-effect damage surrounding them, while another can fire backward. My personal favorite is The Potager, whose ability fuses all projectiles into a single ball, making for a wildly fun yet slightly more challenging experience. Overall, every new character brings a distinct appeal to the roster.
In addition to the characters, Risen Ballbylon adds four brand-new base balls, along with roughly five additional variations per ball, unlocked by fusing them. While none of these additions completely revolutionize the game, they are welcome tools that encourage you to experiment and subtly alter your strategies.
This sense of experimentation extends to a fresh batch of passive abilities. Most of these passives are locked behind the new characters, which forces you to take them out for multiple spins as you figure out how best to utilize them. Like the new balls and characters, these passives enrich your options without disrupting the core game loop.
City-Building and Deepened Exploration
The base-building aspect also receives a healthy dose of new content. The fresh buildings allow you to unlock the new characters, grant helpful boosts for the expansion levels, and let you further upgrade your fused balls. Furthermore, a new resource, crystals, is introduced to fund specific expansion-related upgrades and buildings. While this adds just a slight layer of depth to the city-building mechanics, I found it thoroughly engaging to dive back into managing and harvesting my town.
When you take the action to the battlefield, you’ll find four brand-new levels. True to the original game, these stages boast fantastic variety in both their visual aesthetics and enemy designs. I was particularly fond of the new enemies found in the first layer, which sport a delightfully eerie, Lovecraftian tone.
Conclusion
BALL x PIT – Risen Ballbylon doesn’t fundamentally alter the core experience, nor does it reinvent the wheel, nor should it. Instead, it delivers precisely what fans of the original game could want: more content. It offers new characters, inventive balls with gameplay-altering mechanics, fresh buildings, and striking new levels filled with unique monsters. If you, like me, fell in love with the addictive loop of BALL x PIT and chased every single unlockable the base game had to offer, Risen Ballbylon is the perfect excuse to dive back in.
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