Ballionaire review

pcgamer.com:

What is it? A pachinko machine that's also a strategy roguelike.
Release date December 10, 2024
Expect to pay $11.10/£12.34
Developer newobject
Publisher Raw Fury
Reviewed on Gigabyte G5 (Nvidia RTX 4060, Intel Core i5 12500H, 16GB DDR4-3200)
Steam Deck Verified
Link Official site

In 2007, a game called Peggle was released. In 2008, the world suffered a global economic crisis. To this day I refuse to believe these two facts were unrelated. Peggle was as all-consumingly moreish as it was simple—it was essentially just a pachinko machine, where you fired a ball into a screen full of ‘pegs’ and tried to hit ten orange ones on the way down. The thing is, the only agency you had was the direction you fired the ball in. After that, all you could do is sit back and watch, making it almost entirely luck-based.

Once you finally accepted that, the spell would hopefully break, and you could finally uninstall the bloody thing. But now developer newobject has come up with Ballionaire, a twist on pachinko that adds roguelike deckbuilding elements. Essentially Peggle has gone to college, smartened up, and gotten itself a masters degree in compelling strategy gameplay. Oh no. Oh God no.

The goal is to make enough money to pay a tribute that has to be cleared every seven balls or it’s game over. The starter tribute is 500 dollars, which is worrying, because the board is initially a complete tightwad. Hitting these pegs pays out a pathetic 1 dollar apiece, the kind of financial reward that would embarrass even a games journalist. Luckily, after every ball you get a choice of three obstacles (also, a little confusingly, called balls) that you can add to the table. A trampoline will pay out $200 if you hit it, and bounce the ball upwards. A smiling tree will also pay out $200, but only if you hit it from the bottom up. Ah, but as an apology for that irritating caveat, the tree also gains a small multiplier bonus after every single ball played, meaning it can become a substantial