Haven't played a new release sports game in fifteen years or so, and when this longtime Sony exclusive was made available on Xbox, on Game Pass, on day one, I knew I'd take the plunge. The gameplay is more or less what it's always been, and the things I loved and hated came down to the menus and game modes. Huge fan of the idea of a "diamond dynasty" in which you essentially build up a fantasy team of the best possible players from years past and present. Give this old-ass millennial Frank Thomas, Alfonso Soriano, and Pedro Martinez any day. The flagship "Road to the Show" feature felt like a total slog though, just tons of time spent simulating games and churning through mundane menu text. Huge bummer that you can only have three pitches with a create-a-pitcher, and if they've fixed that via patch by now, who cares? Too little, too late. Another huge issue: the servers constantly crashing. A minor annoyance when you want to start playing a game, but an enormous pain in the ass when you've just spent an hour on a crucial win of some sort and the network shits its pants and bails, erasing your hard-earned W. Need to tear myself away from this one because the dopamine hits associated with unlocking so many players and perks and cards are enough to addict a man, but the time spent here ultimately just isn't worth it with so many other games on the table.

On one hand, I can understand that it's gotta be hard as hell to go from one dedicated platform to four within the same yearly cycle as the previous games, but man, the changes just aren't doing it for me. Road to the Show being based on loadouts more or less instead of game to game progression is a slog. Even NBA 2K is more giving of its microtransaction currency to build up your white beard tall dude. In fact, seeing that perks can be bought with the game's stubs, we can safely say there's some microtransaction fiddling here, too.

Moreover, next gen has some shaky performance, mainly on cutscenes and not during actual play, to be fair, but nothing that seems to suggest we're getting the next generation of a sports title. Stadium Creator is neat and once they basically make it functional, like adding search features that could let us report the edgelord racist ones, that'll be cool. Just kinda bummed that I even had so many nits to pick on a game I usually just love every year, man.