Backyard Baseball

I think this is meant to be said but, considering what you get, I do not recommend BYB 2026 yet at the current price point. The gameplay itself is struggling in the fielding element, with various glitches and exploits occuring, where fielders will not be able to pick up a ball despite having ran over and they are frozen in place except they can still move at your command??? A very weird occurance. This also wasn't helped by the auditory glitches found at the Super Colossal Dome where whenever you have a player enter the dugout, you get hit with a BLUSTER of elephant sound effects? When examining the captions, often for the generic players they will state [CustomKid] or [InsertNameofVA] or [DifferentGenericName] instead of the proper one, and many of the dialogue still lacks captions in certain places, and sometimes is left unfinished without proper punctuation or phrases said. There also is the presence of [Pronoun] in the captions instead of the player's pronoun being said. The voice acting has plenty of highs and lows, the gameplay rhythm is fun but clearly if you're a baseball fan who wants a less arcadey experience this wasn't going to be for you in the first place, not to mention that fielding is just too hard to handle currently, with poor control. This isn't helped by how on the higher difficulties the outfield can play a perfect game yet you are struggling to properly handle yourself. Bunting is abnormally difficult and proves useless, so good luck doing anything with that. Batting itself has become easier because of the lack of depth in the pitch circle as they show up and I would love for the adjustment to go back to that, but it's not as big as a fault compared to the fielding experience. The characters are fun as well, which are the highlight, but many of them suffer from poor voice acting (see Chico Pappas who has a VA that did not get properly mixed and mastered to sound right, as he is about several decibels higher than anyone else, and also sounds like a grown ass man. Ah, yes, puberty ends at 10, not 25, or ah, yes, he took growth hormones. Fantastic!), or lack details from the prior games in the series that kept them distinctive, such as some expressions of characters. Similarly, the walk-up themes are considerably weaker than before, and it's a step-back, but something that cannot be changed easily, much like the voice acting. Some of the wording on things is unclear in League Mode, making me confused on the format in championship rounds of things. For 40 dollars, you would expect a product that is finished and filled, however when the generic unlockable characters do not sit on the bench and can only be selected by scrolling ALL the way over to the side and clicking on TOP of randomly assigned stickers to them, it's not exactly ideal. As much faith as I would love to give MadCat and Playground for their efforts because this is a series that has gone through so much worse in terms of their entries and especially with a smaller studio that is more proactive, I want to give them grace. I recall during the release of the demo I lodged a big complaint concerning laptop performance (which has largely been resolved in the final build), so I do believe that they are able to improve upon what they've released but because of how empty this game is world-wise and how lacking it is in core fundamentals that ought to be re-evaluated, or just cleaning things up! But at the current moment of the game as of 1.0.8.3 (when I am writing this review), I cannot recommend this product at 40 dollars. Half the price, certainly. 30, if I'm being generous. I do believe that it can very much be worth 40 dollars, but not now.

Game of the year

it is awsome so fun i love it and i love you tooooooo

i like baseball go mets

worth it for the nostalgia hit you will get, but $40 is a bit too steep.

Doing my part; very fun game, definitely worth your time to help support further updates for that good ol' Backyard Baseball. Hopefully base price comes down around 10 bucks, but theres enough content to keep you satisfied. Here's hoping to more!