AddForce only works in one direction

Unity Engine
1

I’ve looked at lots of examples and really can’t see what I’m doing differently… but when I use AddForce to have a ball get kicked in the direction the player’s character is facing, it only ever goes in one direction regardless of which way they are facing. Here’s what I’m doing in my character movement script:

if (move > 0) {
                LastFacingRight = true;
}else if (move < 0){
                LastFacingRight = false;
}

if (shoot && hasBall && ball != null) {
                ball.isKinematic = false;
                ball.transform.SetParent(null);
                ball.transform.localScale = new Vector2(1,1);
                ball.GetComponent<CircleCollider2D>().enabled =true;
               
                if (LastFacingRight) {
                    ball.AddForce(new Vector2(500f, 500f));
                }else{
                    ball.AddForce(new Vector2(-500f, 500f));
                }

                hasBall = false;
                ball = null;
}

If the player is facing right, the ball gets kicked out with a decent force upwards and to the right as expected, but if they are facing left the ball just gets dropped on the spot.

I’ve put a breakpoint at the start and stepped through and I can see the LastFacingRight variable is working as expected and if the player is facing left then this line with the negative x axis force does indeed get executed:

ball.AddForce(new Vector2(-500f, 500f));

I have tried all sorts of different things that I’ve seen other people recommend, like using this instead:

ball.AddForce(-Vector2.right * 500f));

But same end result… always works when facing right but never when facing left.

2

I can’t edit the original post for some reason so here’s what I was going to edit it with:
EDIT: I have found if I remove this line it works as expected:

ball.GetComponent<CircleCollider2D>().enabled =true;

So the problem must be the collider of the ball is hitting the collider of the character, but I’m not sure how to get around this… I need to disable the collider when the character picks up the ball and the ball gets its parent set to the character (if I don’t do this then the character and ball fly around all over the place), but what is the best way to handle enabling it again without it messing up the movement. I tried moving the line above down below the call to AddForce but made no difference.
I’m thinking maybe just have a timer that enables the ball collider again after half a second or something so that the ball has got clear of the character but that seems a bit of a bad way to do it…