Played On: Xbox Series X
Time Played: 5 Hours 3 Minutes

Avoid this game at all costs. If you want a game that’s a realistic take on baseball, play MLB The Show. If you want a game that has good controls and gets the rules and soul of the sport right with a bit more of a whacky feel to it, play any of the entries in the Super Mega Baseball series.
This game is a terrible mix between Super Mega Baseball and the worst parts of that baseball mini game from the most recent Olympic Games video game.
Awful controls, terrible gameplay and some of the worst AI I’ve seen in a sports game released in the 21st century. I picked it up $1.99 and I still feel cheated. Not worth it, even for the achievements/trophies.

There's plenty of room in the market right now for an arcade-style baseball game (Super Mega Baseball, despite the name and cartoon art style, plays like a (very fun and fast-paced) simulation-style baseball game). Unfortunately I can't recommend anyone give this game a try.

There are some shockingly basic problems with gameplay:

- Every time you take control of a fielder, they stop in place and have to slowly start accelerating again. So a groundball up the middle can easily roll to the wall as your center fielder starts, then stops, then again starts chasing the ball like they're stuck in the middle of the road in a bad dream.

- All pitching gameplay vs. the CPU is meaningless. I can't say with 100% certainty that pitch type and location are totally pointless, but I tested. I threw dozens of pitches as far out of the zone as I could, and I threw dozens more straight down the middle, and the results were indistinguishable. Almost all at-bats end with the ball put in play.

- Team power-ups are poorly explained, the logic behind when they can and can't be used isn't clear, and they're not at all balanced from team to team.

- Players will often ignore your inputs when you're trying to throw to a base, standing there while runners reach safely.

- I couldn't find the pitching attributes of my players anywhere in the pause menu. So when one pitcher got tired, I had to repeatedly sub him out for other guys on the team (pitching attributes appear when the player is on the mound) until I found one who could pitch. Maybe I was just being silly and this was in an obvious place, but the UI has several other similar issues.

There are plenty of other smaller problems (players and teams lack personality and seem randomly-generated; the scoreboard UI is awful; the sticker attribute system makes no sense; the actual team structure of the real Little League World Series was oddly replaced by a set of fictional teams) but that all sits behind the major gameplay issues.

The overall art style is the one piece I really enjoyed. The art in the menus is well-made, and the team logos are fun. The player models are decent. The fields (all fictional except for the home of the real LLWS, Howard J. Lamade Stadium) are well-designed and match their regions without being too fantastical.

It's a shame. I liked the 2008-2010 LLWS games (developed by Now Production, a totally separate studio) and I love a casual, mindless baseball game.

I played both the Switch version and the PlayStation Plus two-hour trial on PlayStation 5.

Basic mechanics make this game a chore to play. Your outfielders get switched at random when the batter hits the ball, making fielding a challenge. It also doesn't help that fielders have a tendency to just stop and not respond for a second after picking up the ball, which makes it tough to get a runner out. I guess it kind of helps that random quick time events pop up rarely when fielding, which does kind of alleviate the issue but not entirely.

Batting is also not great as I found it difficult to hit the ball compared to the many other baseball games I have played, both arcade and simulation. The ball comes across the plate slowly, which makes it hard enough to figure out when to swing.

Commentary is there, but very repetitive. Power-ups exist in the way of stickers you equip to your team pre-game, but aren't entirely explained. The game also feels slow, even for an arcade baseball game. I do not know much about the real-life Little League Baseball World Series so maybe this is intentional, but have to admit it felt jarring. Options like number of innings and some other gameplay options exist, but the ball just moves slow whenever it is put into play.

I have not played any of the previous Little League Baseball games (which I have heard are much better), but I had a much more engaging time with series like MLB 2K, Backyard Baseball, Super Mega Baseball and The Bigs.