Super Mega Baseball 4 Review – A Solid Changeup

Sports video games are becoming more complex as the years pass. They add new features to the team management and the on-field gameplay. Super Mega Baseball 4 is a throwback to sports games from the 1990s. It features streamlined gameplay, incredible levels of customisation and introduces novel concepts. Although the throwback strategy is in many respects sound, there are some limitations.

Super Mega Baseball 4 welcomes you to the game field. The arcade style of gameplay is my favorite. Rock-solid gameplay mechanics allow you to blast through the game while still feeling that you have a significant impact in each play. Metalhead Studio has done a great job of making it so scoring a strikeout from the rubber feels as good as sending a ball soaring into the bleachers from the batter’s box. The fielding is a bit lacking, with diving feeling imprecise and sometimes I struggled to guess where my outfielder should be placed.

Pitching and throwing are determined by minigames. It grew on my over the years, but I still wished that the pitching games, in which you must align a moving reticule to your target, could be changed.

 

Each of these can be tuned by changing your “Ego,” which essentially makes up your difficulty sliders, but I’m disappointed that none of these can be further changed. In fact, that’s one of my chief complaints about the otherwise solid Super Mega Baseball 4: The options are so barebones that they essentially only allow you to tune the audio and visuals of the game, but not the gameplay itself. If you want a different camera angle or to alter the control schemes, you’re completely out of luck.

Super Mega Baseball 4 excels in team management more than other sports games. The game has a decent roster, even without an MLB license. It features hundreds of real and fictional legends. However, I wanted to pay homage to the ‘90s era of baseball from which this game draws inspiration, and Super Mega Baseball 4 enabled me to do more than I even wanted, allowing me to customize every player’s looks, gear, animations, music, and abilities, plus the uniforms and logo of my team.

I poured time into creating my own squad full of some of the stars not in the game, and when I was finished, the time investment was well worth it as I had a team full of my favorite players from the era in which I most obsessed over the sport, which I could then take into every mode. The customization options in Super Mega Baseball 4 are nothing short of remarkable, and if you’re like me and took your virtual tee-ball swings in games like Triple Play Gold Edition or Tony La Russa Baseball 2, you will absolutely adore the roster control options of this game.

The game allows you to play one-offs games, seasons or bracket tournaments. You can also join online leagues and my personal favourite mode, franchise. Shuffle Draft, which gives you 8 cards of players who are still in the draft pool is brilliant. After you choose your player for that round, the remaining seven cards are returned to the deck, the other teams go through the process, and you’re dealt eight more cards until the rosters are full. The deckbuilding aspect of the game is a fun twist to traditional sports drafts. A couple of times, I played a Shuffle Draft to just see what I came up with.

While in Franchise mode, you’re presented with managerial decisions after each game. The decisions can range from who gets to wear the last pair socks to who is to blame for an unfortunate loss. Though they sometimes become tedious, these decisions affect player loyalty, which comes into play in the offseason when it’s time to re-sign them. Free agency plays a big role, as contracts only last one year, and I appreciate the ability to make simple one-to-one decisions on a position basis each offseason. However, I’m disappointed by the lack of trading available. I love trading in old baseball video games.

Super Mega Baseball 4 provides a solid alternative to Sony’s MLB annualized game. Super Mega Baseball 4 is a great game for fans of the retro arcade style baseball genre. It also offers a wealth of customization options.

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