Review by OleSophus

"Mediocre at Best"

-Now, I loved Backyard Baseball. I played it like crazy, along with my brother. Then Soccer and Football came out, both of them not as fun as Baseball, but still fun. Then this comes along.

===Presentation===Score- 3.5/10
-One thing I liked about Backyard Baseball was the cartoony looking characters. Well, in order to ''get with the times'' Humongous has made all characters completely 3D. And they didn't do a very good job. Sure, it was like this in Soccer and Football(as well as Basketball) but back then the whole 3D thing was kinda(I say kinda) new, so not many wow games came out in polygonal form. Nowadays we have Final Fantasy X, and GT3, both of which blow this game out of the water. And I wasn't expecting something along those lines, this game looks like it's 7 years old.
-Next we got sound. The voice-acting isn't to shabby, but there's of course a couple of those hokey voices too. Music is well done, but you probably won't get the songs stuck in your head.
-And finally we have the whole menu system. Those who have played any Backyard Sports will remember the cool inside a clubhouse menus that made everything visual. Well... that's gone. It's replaced by blah text buttons, which aren't bad, but the old system was SO much better.
-So in short, it's not to bad, but why didn't they keep the old system?

===Gameplay===Score- 2.5/10
-If you thought the presentation was bad, wait until you play the game. It's just too fast to keep up with for most kids. My 8 year old sister couldn't win one game on the lowest difficulty level, which makes you wonder who the devolpers thought were going to play this game.
-Oh, and the Backyard kids that I love are now made developers obsolete by the ''pro'' kids. This means you have to pick the pros or you'll be destroyed.
-But the gameplay isn't completely horrible. You can play a pretty good rendition of air-hockey, where I sadly spent most of my time.;-)

===Overall===Rent or Buy?
-The entire game just feels rushed. Hopefully Humongous will get their at together next game and create a good game. In other words, stay away, stay FAR away from this game. Pick up one of the old Backyard Sports instead. You'll thank me later.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10 | Originally Posted: 04/26/03, Updated 04/26/03


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