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.
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.