Super Mega Baseball 4 Review (Skullivan)
Well it was always going to be hard to compete with SMB3. That was a perfect game. All they really needed to do was not mess with too much, and just add new features and content.
The good:
- Players are now scaled properly to a baseball field. No more nerfed RF throwing to 1B.
- New music from real artists, some Canadian ones, some banger tracks, with funny GTA-style fake radio commercials in between. I love it.
- Line drive cam looks slick
- New player traits keep things interesting
- Shuffle draft (you and the AI all build your teams one player at a time from pools of 8 players at once) is a really fun and interesting way to create new teams and new franchises
The bad:
- The "legends", the real MLB players, are not good. Many many repeating faces, haircuts. Obviously just create-a-characters. No unique batting stances or windups whatsoever. Mispronounced names of very famous players (Vladimir Gwerwero??). Seems like a single employee spent a weekend on this. Cool idea, poor execution.
- The new UI is not good. It's double the size of the old UI for some reason? It takes up 1/3rd of the screen. It is very inconsistent in style, with different fonts on different backgrounds being used everywhere. The pitch selector looks especially bad - it no longer colours pitch types differently, the pitch types don't line up with each other (it looks like it was drawn freehand) and the fonts used are blurry at 1080p. It all looks like one of those mobile games that gets ported to steam and has massive poorly drawn buttons.
- They have attempted to use gradients for the player stats, but they stay red from 0-70, then go purple from 70-80, then blue for 80-90, then teal for 90-100. So a batter with 70 power has their power listed as red, just like a batter with 0 power. I didn't even realize they were supposed to be gradients until an hour in.
- The new ball/strike/out scoreboard at the top is hard to read, the askew/italic style means it's no longer lined up.
- They took things that you used to be able to do with a single button press, like changing batting order or substituting, and made them 2-3 button presses for some reason. It's like they fired Metalhead's UX designer, who got SMB3 absolutely perfect, and went around messing with things that didn't need messing with.
- There's something off with the lighting - players in white are getting completely washed out, like the highlights are clipping. The lighting looks like when you try to watch an HDR movie on a non-HDR screen. Other players are posting very dark screenshots on Reddit, there are probably lighting bugs in this game.
- The game stutters now. Where SMB3 was mostly buttery smooth, SMB4 stutters way, way more, especially when fielding. Players online are reporting some success with using an external 60fps framerate limiter, which shouldn't be nececssary since the game is already capped at 60fps.
- The sounds are... different. I dunno maybe I just got too used to SMB3? I'm not a huge fan of the slide whistle for every fastball. EDIT: After playing some more, no the sounds are very very annoying. I can't take it anymore. The umpires are all annoying. The crowd is annoying. The sound effects are annoying. I feel like I'm listening to a Looney Tunes cartoon.
- One of the umpires is really freaking annoying, and I had to mute umpires when they started talking. You know how in SMB3 they would do a wacky zany strike call every now and then? They cranked up the frequency. The only thing I can turn down is the volume.
- There is a super cringey "Youtube Creators" league where they got famous youtubers and made them all S-tier players for some reason. Thankfully it can be avoided but it's just kinda weird.
So... there's some good, and a lot of bad. Some of the bad is just bugs, which can be fixed with patches. Some is clear design choices, like the new uglier UI, I'm not sure if that will ever get changed. Some of it was hollow from the start, like the Legends being nothing more than the exact same create-a-character lookalikes we used to make ourselves in SMB3. If you're a die-hard SMB fan, you're probably going to buy this game already. If you're looking for a fun new baseball game to play, go play SMB3 instead, it's free on Game Pass. This game might get presentable some day but it's going to be hard to recommend over the perfection that is SMB3.