Super Mega Baseball 4 review: a monument to the joy of the sport

It’s difficult to envision if you didn’t live through it, but there used to be options for baseball video games on every major platform. Anyone who only remembers the days of MLB: The Show will find it hard to believe that there were hundreds of video baseball games. It’s true, though! It’s true! With options, and more often than not, without MLB’s full, licensed approval.

The MLB Players Association licensed some games and others were licensed with just one player. Ken Griffey Jr. presents Major League Baseball. There were also completely fictional rosters, as in SNK’s Baseball Stars or Jaleco’s Bases loaded. There was even a baseball game without any humans at all — they had been replaced by robots in Konami’s Cyber Stadium Series—Base Wars. We had series like RBI Baseball, Hardball, World Series Baseball, All-Star Baseball, Triple Play… There was even a game called Relief PitcherYou can play as an exclusive reliever. The games ranged from realistic sims to arcade-style games and everything in between. Options!

We’re unlikely to ever go back to that era: Game development is more expensive now than in the ’80s and ’90s, and The Show, like Madden with football or FIFA with soccer, owns the space in no small part because of the head start it has on anyone else. The rise of Super Mega Baseball has ensured that there is at least one other worthwhile entry arriving across modern platforms, though, and it has two things going for it: It doesn’t have to deal with the slog of annualization that can cause a popular franchise to stagnate, and it’s just an immediate, obvious blast to play.

Super Mega Baseball’s developer, Metalhead Software (and now publisher, EA) doesn’t have to worry about releasing a game every year to help secure a licensing deal with MLB and the MLBPA. It’s got its own players, its own teams, its own stadiums. Metalhead spent a good decade improving on its original 2014. Super Mega BaseballRefine, tighten, and evolve the mechanics while adding new ways of playing: Super Mega Baseball 3’s Franchise Mode and its Online Leagues, to name a couple. Super Mega Baseball 4 has built even more on those sturdy foundations, giving you more to do in between games and seasons — on both the goofy and serious sides — and the result is another excellent baseball game that’s worth trying even if you’ve never played the previous entries, or any other baseball game, either.

Image: Metalhead Software/Electronic Arts

For the uninitiated, Super Mega Baseball is something of a mix between Backyard Baseball and Power Pros, with a blend of tight, highly refined mechanics and a cartoonish, tongue-in-cheek humor powering it all — the addition of Legends to the fourth entry brings added weight to those past Backyard Baseball comps. It is not as gloomy as its American portrayal sometimes makes it out to be. World Baseball Classic shows, for example, that international baseball is more than just being polite and solemn. Baseball can be a lot of fun. Baseball is fun! Super Mega Baseball 4This is reflected in every aspect of the league. The goofy player and team names, the memorable, earnest (and big-headed) way everyone is drawn, the sheer number of mustaches you’ll see, the excitement of the crowd, that baseball in this league isn’t just a men’s game but includes women on equal footing, too — it’s all just so fun. Actual, real-life baseball can be this fun, too, both to watch and to play, and it’s wonderful that there’s a video game series, with a fantastic new iteration, to remind us.

Super Mega Baseball 4 possesses the joy and energy — not energy as in vitality, though it doesn’t lack for that, either — you associate with minor league baseball, only with the kind of skill and talent you associate with the big leagues. Although it is often arcade-like, Super Mega Baseball 4The game also displays a similar appreciation of sport’s minutiae. You can adjust the difficulty of the game by adjusting the amount of time you have to react at the plate and on the mound. It also controls how many times opposing batters will make you pay. If you don’t know what a mistake pitch is, Super Mega Baseball 4Can teach you within a few days.

The computer can also adjust to your actions. You can fool hitters or have your pitches anticipated, and it’s not random, but a believable reaction. The third time through the order penalty — a real phenomenon denoting the dangerously familiar third time hitters are seeing a pitcher in a given game — rears its head here if you don’t switch out your pitchers or know how to adjust to the batters’ adjustments. If you choose a higher difficulty level, it is less likely that you will be able get away with pitching up into the zone. But at the same time, knowing when to fire a rocket up and in will cause hitters to chase even when they should know better — just like in real baseball. The game might seem like an absurd caricature but Super Mega Baseball 4It is the best way to represent the myriad of tiny details that have huge effects on sport.

Image: Metalhead Software/Electronic Arts

You can’t do anything. Super Mega Baseball 4 The Show is more real than The Show in part due to the 200 new Legends, including David Ortiz, aren’tYou have more space to fill in and project the characters. Characters feel more alive when their moods or health levels fluctuate over time. This can affect their ability to throw an accurate pitch in the corner or drive the ball to the side of the plate. You can take a journey with each of the characters through their trials and triumphs.

This two-run blast came not only after the player had been slamming the ball with everything he’d got, but also following a series of games where he was unable to produce anything. And since you were there for all of those moments and watched them go from “Locked In” to “Neutral” to “Tense,” to the point where they maybe even needed a day off to try to get right, that dinger counts for more than it shows on the scoreboard. You can feel the weight they’ve been carrying slide right off as they watch the ball clear the fence, or see a breaking ball catch the inside corner and freeze a batter, and it’ll only further connect you to the player and the game. All of this from the same game whose cover is graced by both Ortiz and someone named “Hammer Longballo.” Super Mega Baseball 4 is replete with goofy energy, and baseball is the perfect sport for it, even if it doesn’t always come across on TV or in the most “realistic” video games. Like every other iteration of the series, you’ll be playing the best version digitally.

Super Mega Baseball 4 Released on 2 June on Nintendo Switch and Xbox One. Electronic Arts provided a code for a PC pre-release to review the game. Vox Media partners with affiliates. Vox Media earns commissions from affiliate products, although this doesn’t influence the editorial content. Find out more about affiliate links. additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.