Ballionaire Review

After playing the Ballionaire demo a while ago, I was quite looking forward to seeing more levels, so when I got the chance to review the game, I was eager. It features an ostensibly a pachinko-style board, whereupon you can place triggers gained after each of five ball drops, to give tribute to some Elder beings.

It’s light on story (by which I mean it’s basically nonexistent) simply tasking you with gaining that tribute. Every time the ball hits one of the pins, it nets you $2. Since the ball pings off in a random direction, you’re going to be hard-pressed to hit enough pins to get, say, $100,000. So, you need to place down some triggers to give you bonuses, such as a cactus that pays you $400 unless it’s hit, or a tree that pays out $200 if it’s struck from beneath.

Then you get into the deeper game that is Ballionaire, because no matter how many trees you have, the Elder beings want more and more tribute until they’ll let you move to another table or higher difficulty level. So, you put in some ball spawners, like a chicken that can produce 12 egg balls, or a campfire for three fire balls. Hopefully, the fire balls will activate the radiator (and transform into water balls) or bonk the firework (which will create more balls), but like literally everything in this game, it’s all down to random chance.

After the fifth drop, so long as you have enough tribute, you will be given a boon, which is usually a passive ability, and it will persist until the end of the run. Perhaps it will be “every ball will spawn with an ingredient” (such as bread or a tomato), which you might want to choose if you’ve set up a frying pan or a mouth. But again, the options will be a random choice from those you’ve unlocked.

You could end one run with $100,000, but in the very next run with even more triggers, you could fail to hit the $60,000 target. Sure, you expected the main ball to go to the left like it has done 15 times in a row, but this time it went right! It never goes right! Except for four of these five drops when it did. And then in that fifth drop, it just pinged off of the board immediately, because random!

It honestly doesn't feel like the pins in Ballionaire mean anything. I can completely understand not wanting the ball to get stuck in an infinite loop, but sometimes the ball will do the same thing five times, or one time, or just act like it was stuck and launch straight out the top of the board without bonking any of the six triggers it most definitely should have collided with. Oh, and you basically have to railroad the ball to get it to hit anything in the bottom right of the pyramid, that corner is basically safe from bonking in case you have any triggers that require not being hit.

Ballionaire has five tables, each with five difficulties and a sandbox mode. I’d love to tell you how each table and difficulty feels different to one another, but after six hours I’m still stuck on the first one. You have to clear nine tributes, each of a higher and higher number, and no matter what I try I cannot reach the final tribute, let alone clear it. It is super frustrating to not be able to progress to the next table. I can play them in sandbox mode, but there’s no point since you don’t unlock anything new or earn achievements. So, while I’ve tried the tables, I can’t really form an opinion about them because it’s not been as part of a real game.

You get tokens to unlock new triggers from a gacha vending machine, and it starts with over 70 items to unlock. I have only 15 left to unlock. Again, I haven’t completed the first table, despite unlocking in the region of 60 extra items and boons. This might be fine for those who want a “numbers go up” roguelike, but I like to actually progress in games, and seeing a ball ignore every obstacle yet again as if it’s doing it on purpose, is not what I’m here for.

It has a really good art style, with expressive triggers (yes they have faces) and decent designs. The five boards are interesting and varied, and the music is fine overall.

Ballionaire might bonk with you, or it might get immediately wasted on a cactus, there’s no way of telling. Read the reviews and see if this is a game for you, because you might like spending six hours repeating the same task with slight differences.