MLB The Show 20 – Review
Follow Genre: Sports, Simulation
Developer: SIE San Diego Studio
Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment
Platforms: PS4
Tested on: PS4

MLB The Show 20 – Review

Site Score
8.0
Good: Great graphics, Interesting game modes
Bad: Most of the gameplay relies on perfect timings
User Score
7.5
(2 votes)
Click to vote
VN:F [1.9.22_1171]
Rating: 7.5/10 (2 votes cast)

Just like FIFA, Pro Evolution Soccer and the many other sports simulation games, MLB The Show 20 is one of those games that baseball fans are waiting for to release. MLB The Show 20 is the newest installment in the Major League Baseball franchise and it is sure to bring the fans a great experience in a new season of Major League Baseball. As for us, as a European website, we’re not really the direct target audience, but we still got a chance to take a look at the newest baseball game.

Story

MLB The Show 20 has a few different game modes that have some story content. The first one is called: March to October. This mode will let you play as your favorite team from the beginning of the season and will let you join in on many important games at key moments to try and turn the tables or finish the last few innings to make your team win that game. These key moments can vary from coming back when you are behind with two innings left or making the last hit to get that last winning point. The game mode Road to the Show features the most story content. Here you can create your own player and make a career for yourself. You first start on a scout event where scouts will determine your skills and eventually decide where you’ll be playing. From then on, you’re going to play with a team and go through the season. You will constantly have to make choices and you’ll have a lot of dialogues between matches that will influence your fame and stats. Your personality will grow with each choice you make. Your choices will influence the outcome of future events so think wisely.

Graphics

MLB The Show looks great. The stadiums look very realistic and have quite a resemblance to the original ones. The players look quite well, although we didn’t really look into it if each player really looks like the one in real life. Sadly, because we’re a European gaming website, we don’t really follow the MLB so most of us aren’t really familiar with the teams and its players. The crowd looks really good as well and also reacts at each ball that comes near them to try and catch it. The menus look very sophisticated but are easy to navigate through. The game has two different broadcast theme styles, a theme specifically designed for The Show 20, and a theme from the MLB Network.

When you’re in the menus and not doing anything with your controller, the game will automatically start a demo match after a while. This is perfect for those moments when you’re done playing for a while and you just want to watch a match. When you’re done with your break, you can join the match or just exit and continue playing your preferred game modes.

Sound

Like in many sports games, the sound section is properly handled. In the menus, you’ll hear a roster of fifteen songs that will play randomly when in the menus. What’s really great in this game, is that you can import your own favorite music from a USB device to the game and create your own playlists for an even better gaming experience. Aside from the music, in sports games, there’s always some commentary that accompanies each match. Of course, MLB has a great commentary team of four professionals that perfectly talk about the game while it’s happening. Surely, like in every other sports game, the commentary can get repetitive after playing a lot, but you wouldn’t want to miss it, because a sports game without commentary would be rather dull.

Gameplay

MLB The Show 20 is a sports game that focuses on baseball. Like other sports games, there are a couple of different game modes to play this game, a quick match mode, Diamond Dynasty, March to October, Franchise and Road to the Show. Diamond Dynasty lets you create your own team with cards that you collect by earning and spending the in-game currency, much like FIFA Ultimate Team. March to October lets you choose a team and play only the key moments that occur in a season. Performing well in these key moments will let the team perform well in the upcoming matches. The Franchise mode lets you become the general manager of your favorite team. Road To the Show lets you create your own character and follow his career from the ground up from the first scouting event to the finals of the season. In this game mode, you’ll make your own decisions, creating a personality for your character and strive to become one of the best players around.

When you start playing the game for the first time and you’ve finished the introductory match, you’ll get to a screen where you can set your preference for hitting, baserunning, pitching, and throwing. Each activity has four different ways to perform these actions. With the assistance of some voice-acting, each type of controls will be explained to you. When you select one, you can first try it out before you choose to save it as your preferred setting. This is a great way of getting the hang of The Show’s gameplay and you can perfectly find out which gameplay settings will suit you the most. The different gameplay settings all vary in your skills and timing. Some of these settings require you to keep paying attention and time each move while others will just let you push a button to hit or throw a ball. The options that require perfect timing are for those who want to challenge themselves even more, because when your timing’s off, your hits and throw will be awful.

After playing a while, we definitely noticed that this game required not much more than a great sense of timing. When batting, your swing timing will decide whether you’ll hit the ball to the field, backwards or even miss it. for inexperienced players, it can be difficult to get into the game as you’ll be missing the correct timing a lot. After each swing, you’ll see if you’re too early or too late, but the times our swings were on point were minimal and sometimes, even with good timing, we would miss the ball not knowing why.

Choosing for simple controls may make the game easier to play in single-player, but the results of your swings and throws won’t be good every time. Especially when pitching, we noticed that with the easiest control, the eventual result of your throws will be way off quite often, so it seems the success rate of your throws is decided randomly. You’ll be rewarded for trying on the hardest control schemes that require the most effort in having the perfect timing. Perfecting these controls can lead to swinging a lot of homeruns and pitching the hardest, most devious balls, which is definitely handy for playing against other online.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, because of our lack of experience and knowledge of the sports and the previous game, we couldn’t really compare this game to its predecessor. For fans of the sports, this is a perfect game to play as the manager of your favorite team or create your own player and try to grow in the ranks of the MLB. The game looks great with some awesome visuals and a great way of presentation. From a distance, you won’t even notice the difference between a match in this game, and one in real-life. The game offers plenty of game modes so there’s always something different to do. For fans of the sports, we’d definitely recommend buying this game.

VN:F [1.9.22_1171]
Rating: 7.5/10 (2 votes cast)
VN:F [1.9.22_1171]
Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)
MLB The Show 20 - Review, 7.5 out of 10 based on 2 ratings
Nickskuh


Administration is my job but gaming is my passion!

No Comments

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.