Ball x Pit is very good
I picked up Ball x Pit, a roguelike brickbreaker with a lot of mechanics borrowed from Vampire Survivors and its various clones. I'm liking it a lot!
You play as a human character who can run around a brickbreaker play field. The bricks are enemies, and they slowly descend from the top of the screen. If they get too close to you or hit you with a projectile, you take damage, and can eventually die. Occasionally, bosses come down the screen, too. You shoot balls at 'em; some of your balls have powers. You collect gems, level up, gain passive buff items, and improve or combine the balls. It's a very clear translation of a lot of the things that succeeded in Vampire Survivors and its clones.
My favorite bit is, of course, combining the balls. Sometimes, when you combine them, they form a very strange ball with a new power! Delightful. I haven't yet decided whether I will call myself done with the game when I actually complete the content, or merely when I Find All The Balls. That challenge seems rather difficult, actually.
The balls can be combined in two different ways... one way "evolves" the two balls and generates a new ball with new powers entirely. However, you can also choose to merely combine the powers of two balls additively, in a "now both are true at once" kind of way. It's a very interesting choice - you sometimes might choose to do this simple additive combination instead of a "evolution" combination, and it's been fun to figure out when and why I should choose one kind of strategy over the other. To make good choices, you really do need to understand the entire Tree Of Balls. It's always good when one of these survivey, grindy kind of games rewards a deep understanding of upgrade synergies.
It's got a fun, grimy, pixelly-textured 3D style that I really enjoy, too. The other surprisingly delightful bit of polish is the way the enemy blocks begin to chant threateningly at you when there are too many of them on the screen.
One bit I'm not yet sure I enjoy is the strange citybuilder-esque mode between matches. You place buildings in a city and "harvest" resources from them by shooting your characters at them and bouncing off of them as if they were balls in the brickbreaker game mode. Building the city provides incremental stats improvements to your characters, but that doesn't seem to fully justify its inclusion. That entire part of the game hasn't yet clicked for me, but it's not yet so objectionable that it makes me like the game any less.
I'm not a massive player of VS clones but I do like the ones which take those mechanics and do something very different with them. I liked Boneraiser Minions a ton, too. The main game mode in Ball x Pit is just as good, which, to me, is a high compliment. These are the only two VS-inspired games that I've actually liked!