Super Mega Baseball 4 is EA Sports’ perfect re-entry back into the world of baseball. The sports genre is one of the biggest genres out there in video games and EA/2K have long dominated it with their respective franchises. However, Sony has had a total stranglehold on baseball with MLB The Show for the last decade. EA has found a very interesting counter to the sim-based franchise that is MLB The Show by adopting a much more casual, arcade-style baseball game.
For those who haven’t played the three previous games, Super Mega Baseball 4 will feel like a throwback to some of the more old-school baseball games like Backyard Baseball. It’s not about the most realistic baseball game with the prettiest graphics, accurate animations for each player, or microtransactions out the wazoo, it’s very simply about having a really fun time, even if it comes across as a bit absurd.
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This is a game that isn’t about laser-accuracy precision and perfect timing when hitting the ball, Super Mega Baseball 4 is designed with the casual player in mind and opts to hold the hand of the player during the trickier moments, like with batting. You’ll still have to do your part and turning up the difficulty does make it harder, but you’ll find that the game does guide your reticle toward the general area of the ball when it’s pitched to you. If you’re playing on an easier difficulty, this will allow you to absolutely crank balls out of the park on a repeated basis, making it more of an impromptu home run derby than a proper baseball game, but that’s part of the joy of the game.
It’s empowering and, when filling the shoes of a legend like Babe Ruth, it’s a baseball fantasy. This is the first time the series has had the ability to use real baseball players and, while you can expect a lot of icons to be filling the field, Super Mega Baseball 4 has expanded its roster with other real life people: YouTubers and baseball content creators. For baseball fanatics, you’ll recognize the likes of Jomboy Media in their own content creator league, which just helps add a special layer to the game that makes it feel like even more of a love letter to baseball.
If you do decide to make the game easier on yourself and not tip-toe into the higher difficulties, it may become very routine and boring. Thankfully, Super Mega Baseball 4 doesn’t have just a handful of general difficulty options like easy, medium, and hard. It has a slider known as “Ego,” which is a number that goes from 0 – 99 with 99 being the most difficult. You can really fine tune how challenging you want the game to be using this slider as it increases the difficulty of the AI you’re playing against and will allow you to either dominate them, have an even game, or get absolutely cooked by them.
This allows you to have games where you do have to be a bit more strategic; instead of just focusing on hitting dingers left and right, you’ll want to get those line drives, bunts, and base hits to ensure you’re making the most of your innings. It’s simply just a bit easier and more fun than a more grueling nine-inning game of MLB The Show, since that game tries to be as realistic as possible.
As a whole, you can really feel the increase in production value that EA Sports’ acquisition of Metalhead Studio has allowed. There’s fancy cinematic cameras, licensed music, and much more to give it all a more premium feel over the last entries. Given that this is a game that is more arcade-y, it leans into being a more comedic style than its rival series. The audience will chirp at you and some of the voice lines you hear may cause you to pause the game for a moment to laugh. At one point, I was sitting on the pitcher’s mound for an extended period of time looking at my phone, not playing the game. Someone in the crowd yelled at me to get off my phone, breaking the fourth wall for a moment. Later, when I was hitting, another person in the crowd yelled, “Ben Affleck was a better Batman than you!” insulting my batting skills with a corny pun. This kind of humor extends into things like player animations as they’ll usually have a goofy walk-up animation where they flex or make some other humorous gesture.
Despite being an arcade-style game, there is still room for some depth beyond hitting bombs every 15 seconds. You can boot up the Franchise mode, which is your typical career-esque sports game mode where you take a team through multiple seasons to try to curate your team for success. You can sign and trade players, focus on developing key athletes, and more to have an engaging experience both on and off the field. It has the depth needed to make you want to keep up with it, but is casual enough that someone who is loosely familiar with baseball can engage with it without feeling overwhelmed.
Super Mega Baseball 4 takes players back to the days of coming home from school, turning on the console, and firing up a game that is good old-fashioned fun. There’s no need to worry too much about stats, the in-game meta, managing an in-game economy, or anything like that. While there’s nothing wrong with those things, sports video games have been missing those larger-than-life sports titles like The Bigs or other games that had just a bit more flair to them. It’s refreshing to have an alternative to MLB The Show, even if it’s not trying to necessarily target the exact same audience. It’s refreshing, will hopefully encourage MLB The Show to not get complacent and continue to shrug off some problems that have been around for quite some time, and gives players options for how they wish to experience a baseball video game.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Super Mega Baseball 4 is out now on Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, and PC. A Xbox Series X review code was provided by the publisher.
