Review: Ballionaire Is a Satisfying ‘Numbers Go Up’ Experience

We’re seeing all sorts of unconventional roguelikes enter the gaming space, and Ballionaire is one of the more unusual ones. A Pachinko-like game, each run places you on a new board to conquer. Your goal? Rack up as many points as possible. It’s fun! However, how much fun it is varies wildly due us being at the whims of RNG, hoping for the lucky shots that will carry us through. 

In Ballionaire, you’ll be presented with a field ready to be filled with pegs. As you drop balls and the bounce off of them, you’ll trigger effects and bolster your score. The plateaus you need to overcome grow as you drop more balls, and you get more pegs to fill the field after each drop. The key is to attempt to place them strategically, where they’ll offer the most benefits, in order to keep meeting quotas and master each area. Along the way, you’ll garner things like relics to passively help. Of course, there will also be Tribulations that gradually hurt and make things more difficult.

I’m going to be brutally honest here and admit that my first three to five Ballionaire runs weren’t everything they could be. It was all my fault too. You’re presented with pegs! You don’t really know how they may behave or interact without actual experiments! You need to get a feel for the board and see possibilities for bounces and paths! It’s fine. Newobject designed the game in such a way that even if you aren’t playing optimally, everything feels satisfying. Numbers are constantly going up, even exponentially if you aren’t making smart groupings, so it feels fun.

After a few runs, Ballionaire will click. Trust me. Even if you aren’t making the best choices, it’s so enjoyable. You’ll always get three choices for a new peg to place, keeping you from being backed into a corner. The UI is very clear and descriptive, so you can see what happens when it is placed, what passives come up, what happens when items drop, and conditions to potentially destroy them. It feels like there are no penalties for trying things. You’re encouraged to do your best and test things out.

I feel like the presentation helps with that too. Ballionaire is such a bright, poppy game. Everything is so colorful and flashy. It really attracts your attention once the balls start dropping, so you’re paying attention to interactions and seeing when something special is triggered to grant you bonuses. 

As you’d expect from a game with RNG in play, the only thing that keeps me from loving Ballionaire more is that it is a roguelike that does leave a lot up to chance. While Balatro is another game where luck of the draw can determine how far you’ll go, I found that there’s more control there than here. The fact that it can be so easy for a Ballionaire run to end through no fault of your own, even though you did everything right, is a let down. 

It also means that while Balatro is a game I felt I could sit and play for hours, Ballionaire feels more like a one run and done situation. You take a chance, see how far you go, then come back a few hours or days later. This isn’t a bad thing! It’s just the luck-based gameplay, combined with eventual random Tribulations that can passively make things more difficult, impede repeated runs. Since we don’t get more control over the game, other variables can really get in the way sometime. It isn’t even like Peggle or Peglin, where we do feel like we have more bearing on what happens when the Pachinko-parts come around.

Ballionaire comes down to chance, which means how much you enjoy it completely changes from one run to the next. It’s a charming game, to be certain. There’s a lot of replay value here. It just doesn’t offer the same degree of control as some roguelikes due to it pulling so heavily from Pachinko and Peggle, which means it’s easy for RNG to completely ruin your day.

Ballionaire is available on Steam.