Through the game's 11 levels, the player takes a first-person perspective, shooting metal balls to destroy glass obstacles.

Additionally, the player can shoot up to five balls at once by smashing a consecutive sequence of crystals and gather power-ups that are activated for a limited amount of time.

Dennis Gustafsson programmed the game and created its physics engine and acoustics, while Henrik Johansson designed its levels.

Smash Hit received positive reviews from critics, who praised its physics engine, graphics, music, and sound effects.

Smash Hit is a first-person 3D rail shooter and endless runner video game in which the player travels forward and must shoot metal balls to destroy glass obstacles while conserving their supply, as the game ends when the player runs out of balls.

[14][15] Smash Hit was developed and published by the Swedish indie studio Mediocre, co-founded by Dennis Gustafsson and Henrik Johansson in 2010.

Mediocre tasked Holmquist with creating an electronic soundtrack and listed Gold Panda's Fifth Ave, Shigeto's Look at all the Smiling Faces, and Robot Koch's Water and Solutions as reference tracks.

[22] Gustafsson also worked on creating the game's physics engine, wanting the glass shattering system to be "fully procedural" and reliable.

[22][23] The game's obstacles are procedurally generated and were written with the Lua programming language, while shadows were based on the ambient occlusion rendering technique.

[31][32] Smash Hit received honourable mentions for the Independent Games Festival's 2015 Main Competition.

[5] Harry Slater of Pocket Gamer saw the game as entertaining but irritating; according to Alex Beech of AppSpy, the checkpoint system ultimately undermined the endless mode scoreboard idea.

[4][10] In a review for MacLife, Andrew Hayward added that initial levels could be toiling to players without the in-game purchase when constantly replaying the game.

[b] Michelle Starr of CNET described the glass-shattering visual effect as impressive,[1] while Pugliese viewed them as detailed and naturalistic.

[34][35] Gustafsson commented that the idea for a VR version was brought up before the game was initially released for mobile; once the virtual reality headset gained popularity, the developers thought it was a "good fit".

[36][37] Computer scientists Margherita Antona and Constantine Stephanidis reported that no differences in difficulty were seen between the mobile and virtual reality versions of Smash Hit.