Backyard Baseball

Love this game. It feels old and new at the same time. Love that the characters haven't changed. This brings back my child hood. Glad this game has been refreshed for the new generation

At launch, the game was a bit too punishing even on normal diff for some reason. Then I figured out controls, saw I had an update for the game, played it again, and everything made sense. I really am happy I gave this game a shot. Even though the price tag is a bit steep with its current build, I really enjoyed what I got. The game's vibrant, and hitting feels good. Defense can get a bit rough at times, but I'm chalking it up on my end as being not used to the game still. This game really brought back the memories of playing Backyard Baseball '97 for me when I was a kid. Seeing how passionate this dev team/publisher are (from what I saw on Joon Lee's channel), I'm happy to see that the spirit of the game lives on with this one. I hope the dev team continues to progress in making more Backyard sports games like Backyard Basketball, but only time will tell. For now, cheers to finally seeing a new Backyard title worthy of being played and here's to many more updates that'll iron out some of these newer features while also stomping out the remaining bugs that I and many other players encountered. Bug Examples: had a kid morph through a red fence on one the fields. Can't remember the name of the field itself, but it was jarring when the game registered practically the same hit the very next up to bat as a home run. Also the game does have stuttering issues mid-game on Windows 10. Not sure if it's the same for Windows 11 users. Lastly, when doing Season Play, every time I finish a game, the announcer gets mixed up with saying that their team is next up to bat, only to cut off to what sounds like a 'end of game' voice line. Not sure what's triggering the incorrect line to be played.

I think some balancing issues are present in the pitching and hitting mechanics HOWEVER this game reminds me vividly of what I remember growing up 1000 percent recommend for a chill and fun experience

yeah its fun and all but can someone make an echivment thing i got a triple like 50 times didnt get the triple threat acheivment i did the 6 inning thing with no errors no acheivment i steal bases and im not getting the acheivment it doesnt make any sense someone help also the price

Generally a good bit of fun, especially for a quick game or two in your spare time. That said, there are a few downgrades from the originals that I immediately noticed. Each part of the game (batting, pitching and fielding) are just a little worse than the originals as a result of these decisions, which I'll go over: For batting, the batting pitch assist options are pretty poor. Your basically have "perfect assist" or "no assist" which is a stark downgrade of the originals where you could get different size shadows indicating the rough area the pitch was going to be in. This shadow would change size depending on the batter's skill, and it still required you to watch the ball in. This new game eliminates a lot of that. Once you realize what to do, it makes it basically impossible to strike out. For pitching, the new pitch-placement system has way too much control. In the original your pitcher had a circle around where you placed the pitch where it could go that changed size depending on the pitcher and pitch being thrown. Now there's a timing mechanic which makes basically all pitchers perfectly accurate once you get the (very easy) timing down. Now there's no reason to not paint corners with every single pitch, because you never need to worry about walking a batter. Finally, with fielding the main problem is the lack of diversity in fielding quality. Though it was often way too exaggerated in the original, those games made for a much more diverse fielding experience. Some kids had cannons for arms and could catch a ball behind the back, but others couldn't throw more than 10 feet and would watch the ball right into their foreheads instead of their gloves. Now, everyone is similarly competent. They all have great gloves and they all have roughly the same throwing ability, and that ability is essentially just a long looping toss. I have yet to turn or even see a classic double play since it takes so long to throw the ball from one kid to another that by the time you get the out on the first kid the other runner will have gotten to base safely. All of this results in a less dynamic game than the original, though still a fun time. It feels like they took all the big ups and downs of the originals and evened it all out to a more consistent but slightly less exciting game in general. Half of the fun of the originals was having to deal with the shenanigans that happened because kids tripped or totally missed a catch or something, but that basically never happens in this game. There are other little things too like how the new home-run distance counter kind of removes the excitement of watching a ball and hoping it goes over the fence because you know the moment that distance meter shows up that it was a homerun, or that the random specials have been replaced by a slots mechanic where you can time when it stops and get a specific special, which I of course immediately abused to get three aluminum power bats in a row (which also...those should be way rarer). Like I said, a pretty fun little romp, looks like everyone enjoyed making it and I'm enjoying playing it, but it's weird to say as an adult reminiscing about a kid's game I played...they removed a lot of the challenge and skill of the original games

eeeeee

Game has some pretty game breaking bugs to work out, like the ball disappearing and the only way to proceed is by the batting team rounding the bases. If the batting team is the CPU, it takes like 2 min for this to happen. There's also a stark difference between having the ball marker handicap on and off. As a new player, I'm getting up to 8 runs an inning with it on, and with it off I can't hit ♥♥♥♥. The 3-dimensional feedback you get with the handicap being off is low to non-existent. To make matters worse, you don't get to see where the pitch ended up after its called a ball or a strike. I'm sure the game will improve, and once these issues get mitigated I'll reverse this review, as I am a nostalgic fan of the series.