It's simple: press button, drop ball, number go up. We continue the curious trajectory of the modern roguelite with Ballionaire, a new pachinko-themed indie by developer newobject and publisher Raw Fury. This zesty score-chaser blends deckbuilder and autobattler genres with physics-based gameplay, giving way to considerable depth and stimulating that packs the screen with sweet, sweet numbers. While a few notable design and interface issues mar the final package as it stands, anyone oriented towards game-breaking builds and the construction thereof should find Ballionaire an electrically compelling new pastime.

Japan’s The Wall are all suitable touchpoints for the basics here, where a ball plunks down a board peppered with pins above a bottomless pit. Unlike traditional pachinko, Ballionaire primarily focuses on one initial ball drop per turn, but the board's quantum structure proves vulnerable to luck and strategy, with pick-three draws of "triggers" and "boons" – interpretable as "cards" and "artifacts/relics" in other deckbuilder roguelites – combining to expand the scoring possibilities.

Ballionaire doesn’t have the trick-shot angles of PopCap’s hit 2007 game Peggle or its recent spiritual successor roguelite Peglin, as each ball drop prevents any direct control. The game is more concerned with the board itself, and its unique accumulation of selected triggers and reactive surfaces. This detailed approach to construction summons apt comparisons to contemporary deckbuilder classics like Monster Train, even if the final package isn’t quite as polished as its predecessors.

Ballionaire Board Design 101

Design Your Own Unique High-Score Machine

You begin Ballionaire on the "Pyramid" board. The animated Eye of Providence at the top follows the cursor as it moves, but don’t let this fool you: each mouse-click or press of the space bar plummets it downward at a random angle. The relative emptiness of a starter board can make the first few rounds of a run feel empty, somewhat uninteresting, and mainly unproductive, like the first few Slay rooms on a starter deck.

However, each lost ball provides a draft from an increasing array of triggers, movers, or holders. With seven drops to a round, the board eventually mutates into a busy web of burgeoning scoring potential, with higher totals required to proceed to the next. Balls can bounce, split, transform, teleport, disintegrate, equip items and elemental properties, then interact with other surfaces and (hopefully) set off a myriad of effects and score multipliers.

The different triggers and elements seem arcane early on, but you'll soon pick up on how they best match and accommodate each other over time. Holders act as banks which generate points each turn, so long as you feed them specific ball types and items, whereas movers bounce or even teleport the ball around the board. A juicy Rube Goldberg machine-like logic guides each eventual deck, with plenty of disorder prompting satisfying experimentation and surprises.

Deckbuilding For Every Occasion

Experiment With Different Decks Over Five Different Levels, Challenge Modes, And The Laballatory

Pyramid persists as the purest-feeling Ballionaire board to play on, while the four others are much stranger, possible even gimmicky. Each combines the game’s basics with new mechanics, including a spinning Ferris wheel board, a moving boat that drops the ball on a line to bring it back up again to the top, pinball mechanics (with limited flipper pulls) in "Pinballionaire," and even a three-reel cycling slot machine.

You can spend currency to unlock new drafts for the pool between runs or experiment with snapshots of previous attempts, and even take snapshots of boards to share with others in the "Laballoratory." With 125+ draftable triggers and 50+ boons, a litany of possible interactions turns this dev-mode-like sandbox into an interesting test environment. It's also satisfying enough to just re-run higher challenge modes with new decks to see how far you get, unlocking more items and tamping down the luck factor with smarter drafts and designs.

I ran through the game's escalating high-score Tribulations and fully unlocked all triggers and boons, which took approximately 12 hours, but I'll definitely be playing more Ballionaire in the future. A total of 16 achievements are available in the game at launch.

Ballionaire’s visual presentation features a pleasingly sunny animated style, but it also comes off as somewhat incoherent. For instance, the jump rope trigger spins around when hit, which doesn't make sense - it could have easily been a trampoline to begin with - and it's hard to discern any clear thematic notions besides "almost everything has a face."

Chaos Doesn't Have To Be Unfair

Luck Isn't The Only Factor

Some of Ballionaire's drafts could stand to be better explained on-the-fly, with certain highlighted defined on a mouse hover in familliar deckbuilder fashion, but often at the expense of others. The "Ballipedia" glossary collects them all for perusal, but it's awkwardly stuffed into the options menu, and a few trigger definitions don't make sense.

Non-Pyramid boards also feature some sloppy physics, like fishing lines that wind onto pins before erratically vanishing or pinballs that fling themselves past the play area upon launch. The latter level is even prone to freezing, which prompts a pop-up error recommending that you quit back to the title screen, which is not a good look.

Draft rates need tweaks, as I found a number of items almost impossible to pull after countless rerolls, like the uncommon-rated holder Piggybonk. Luck of the draw is intrinsic to Ballionaire and deckbuilders in general, but some pull percentages failed the smell test, which leads me to think that the game thumbs the scale toward specific items regardless of rarity.

Past that, Ballionaire’s quirky hallucinogenic aesthetic never fully pays off. This doesn't hamper the game, and provides about as much viable context to play as the exquisite Balatro, but the dialogue scene at the start of a run and its use of mysterious cult-like imagery never develops into anything meaningful, and could just as easily have been discarded with minimal effect.

Final Thoughts & Review Score

Screen Rant Gives Ballionaire 7/10

These missteps aside, Ballionaire remains a wonderfully chaotic roguelite, sure to inspire all that good theory-crafting we love, made even more approachable with its Laballatory test bed. Once you make out the hidden matrix which subverts the game’s frank randomness, it transforms into the spunky little chaos engine that could, and it’s dangerously easy to sneak off for 15 or 20 minutes on any given day to finish off a quick run.

However, individual aspects give the impression of an early-access product. The scarcity of additional boards or modes awaits future mod content post-release, but other under-tested elements remain noticeable. There’s a fun combat gameplay mechanic where hitting a monster draft enough times prompts a reactive reward, but this feels underutilized with its limited range of relevant items, and it’s hard to craft different combat-oriented builds.

Still, anyone who enjoys cooking up score-generating machines should click with Ballionaire, and it crosses over so many accessible genres that there’s bound to be a viable hook for roguelite fans to latch onto. Failed runs often result in a nifty lesson or unbeknownst synergy, so most attempts feel like time well spent, even after unlocking every last item and boon. Ballionaire presents a clever containment of order and chaos that makes it stand out from the pack, even if I find myself mostly sticking to the Pyramid.

A digital code was provided to Screen Rant for the purpose of this review.