Backyard Baseball Review

Backyard Baseball on PC, also coming to Mac, Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch. It’s always pleasant to see familiar faces from your childhood, even more so if you spent countless hours playing matches and winning championships with them. But with this latest edition of Backyard Baseball, nostalgia is skin-deep, lasting as long as a seventh-inning stretch. This reboot capitalizes on that affection instead of paying full respect to why it was earned in the first place. The simple joy present in those classic games has been replaced by an unrewarding, lopsided easiness in this one; almost-effortless hitting and improved but overpowered pitching turn each match into uncontested, near-defenseless blowouts that no amount of big names or attractive artwork can paper over. The result is an incomplete on-field experience, like a prospect that can’t round the bases.