Super Mega Baseball 4 offers a complete game with no microtransactions. However, the game does feature DLC in the form of additional stadiums that can be purchased as they are released. The stadiums are also available as part of the game’s Ballpark Edition.

For the first time in the franchise, Super Mega Baseball 4 will also feature real-world professional baseball players. While the players present in the game aren’t playing in the current Major League Baseball roster, the title instead features over 200 former players from different eras of the sport.

The game features more recent players, like Jason Giambi and Johnny Damon, as well as legends of baseball like Ernie Banks and Babe Ruth.

Super Mega Baseball 4 is coming to PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch on June 2. Pre-ordering the game gets you 3 days early access, aside from the Nintendo Switch version, which only gets you the game with no early access.

The game is also available in its Ballpark Edition, which includes 3 stadiums: Peril Point, Ciudad de Colores, and Castillo Arena. While Peril Point will be available at launch, Cuidad de Colores will come to the game on July 31, while Castillo Arena will arrive on August 31.

In a departure from series tradition, Super Mega Baseball 4 will feature real-world professional baseball players. While the players aren’t from the current Major League Baseball roster, the game instead features over 200 former players from different eras of baseball. It includes more modern players like Jason Giambi and Johnny Damon, and famous legends of the sport, such as Ernie Banks and Babe Ruth.

At its best, Super Mega Baseball 3 does a good job of capturing these kinds of exciting moments. It has simple, easy to understand baseball mechanics, and yet underneath the surface hides a solid enough simulation as well. And yet, while nearly every aspect of the game works well on its own, the disparate elements of the game never quite gel into a fully cohesive experience.

"At its best, Super Mega Baseball 3 does a good job of capturing these kinds of exciting moments. It has simple, easy to understand baseball mechanics, and yet underneath the surface hides a solid enough simulation as well."

At its heart, SMB3 is an arcade baseball game. No real teams, leagues, or players are featured, with the game opting for fictional stand-ins. These teams are fairly creative, for the most part, with some fun team names and logos that keep them interesting and mostly distinct from one another. These teams can also be fully customized, allowing the player to really dive into a team that they’re invested in, and really make the team their own.

The custom players don’t fare quite as well, however. They’re distinct enough from one another, and just as customizable as the teams, but the visual style of the game betrays itself a bit here. The game has a very cartoonish and exaggerated visual style, and the characters almost resemble caricatures. In some cases, this works. The faces are very expressive, and the animations bold and distinct. But some of the characters just don’t look good. The eyes won’t be quite right, or the mouths just a bit too wide. There are some characters that are really endearing looking, and some that are downright terrifying.

Still, that doesn’t really affect the actual baseball experience here, which is mostly solid. As in all other aspects, SMB3 opts for a generally simplified set of baseball mechanics compared to other games. Most aspects of the game only require one or two button presses and some good timing. Batting, for example, requires you simply to line up a reticle to a target that represents the ball’s incoming trajectory, and then time your swing well to hit the ball. Pitching is similar; you select a pitch, line a reticle up to your intended target, and let the ball fly. Fielding, unfortunately, doesn’t hold up quite as well. The controls mostly work, but the game has an awful habit of swapping between fielders on the fly for you, without any real warning. This means plenty of times, you think you’re controlling one fielder, only for the game to decide to switch you to another, supposedly more optimal fielder. This can cause more than a few botched plays, especially early on before you know to start looking for it.

"As in all other aspects, SMB3 opts for a generally simplified set of baseball mechanics compared to other games."

On the field gameplay is mostly solid, despite the problems with fielding, but it also has a tendency to be somewhat uneven in its difficulty. The game has a very customizable difficulty system, called the Ego Meter, which can be adjusted to values from 0 to 99. This level of variety is appreciated, but unfortunately, I was never able to quite find a difficulty level I was satisfied with. At lower levels the game was generally very easy, almost trivially so. The AI was far too easy to strike out, and far too poor at doing the same. At higher levels, meanwhile, they become almost prescient, especially in their batting.

Off the field, the game dives a bit deeper into simulation territory. It features a seasonal management mode and a full franchise mode. The season mode is fairly simple; it’s basically just a series of matches that you play with the same team. The franchise mode, on the other hand, allows you to fully manage your team’s finances, roster, contracts. You control every facet of your team in this mode, albeit still fairly simplified compared to many other games in the genre. The mode works well enough, though I would have preferred it lean a little farther in one direction or the other; it’s not quite deep enough to truly satisfy a simulation urge, like say MLB The Show, but at the same time is just deep enough to feel like a break from the game’s otherwise light and arcade-y mechanics. It results in a mode that, while fun, sometimes feels like a different game than the rest of it.

Aside from those, the game offers a couple of other fun, more arcade style modes to play, such as a pennant race and an elimination mode, where the losing teams in the bracket are knocked out of the competition entirely. Personally, I felt that the game shined the strongest when it embraced these more arcade-y modes. Here, the game is free to let its goofier nature shine through, and it results in a game that can be a lot of fun with a lot of variety. When the game attempts to cross over into simulation territory, the simplicity of the game, which is a strength in the arcade portions, becomes more of a weakness.

"Personally, I felt that the game shined the strongest when it embraced these more arcade-y modes. Here, the game is free to let its goofier nature shine through, and it results in a game that can be a lot of fun with a lot of variety."

Customization is another strong suit of this game. Practically every facet of the experience can be customized, from players to teams and uniforms. You can tweak a player’s entire physical appearance, from their face and hair to their uniform and number to their bat and even their behavior on the field. Teams can be tweaked as well, changing colors, logos, and home stadiums. The faces still aren’t always great, but overall it does a long way to getting the player invested in their team, which is important in a game without and official license.

Overall, Super Mega Baseball 3 is a fun, arcade-y baseball game with a lot to offer, especially for more casual sports fans and those looking for a lighter, less demanding experience. Most of the on-field gameplay is fun and easy to learn, the visuals, though not always the best, are bright and easy to follow, and the game’s modes are mostly enjoyable. The game does flounder a bit when it attempts to cross over into simulation territory, as it doesn’t quite commit far enough to either simulation or arcade silliness to stand out in that regard. Overall, however, Super Mega Baseball 3 is a solidly enjoyable experience. If you’re looking for the next big thing in baseball simulations, look elsewhere. But if you’re just looking for a fun, lighthearted sports experience that you can pick up and play, there are way worse games on offer than this one.

This game was reviewed on the Xbox One.

To learn more about this game, its development, and some technical aspects regarding how it runs on the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro, Gamingbolt reached out with the following questions  for Metalhead Software. All of the questions were answered by Scott Drader who is the  co-founder of the company.

"We’ve strived to keep the core gameplay equally accessible in terms of controls and pacing, and those goals flowed into the design of the game’s new systems."

There hasn’t been a whole lot of competition in the baseball game market but Super Mega Baseball still managed to stand out – and deliver – with its gameplay. How did that momentum influence you going into Super Mega Baseball 2?

We’ve never had any shortage of ideas in terms of things we want to add to the game, but with the first version, we had to focus on realizing just the core ideas. Fortunately people seemed to generally like those core ideas, and it meant a chance to expand on things with the sequel. The nice thing about making a sequel is that you have a lot of community feedback to base your decisions on. That made it easy to pick the main focus areas for the sequel – more mature and realistically-scaled visuals, customization, and online play.

Given how it’s touted as streamlined baseball, what were some of the goals in mind when developing the sequel?

We’ve strived to keep the core gameplay equally accessible in terms of controls and pacing, and those goals flowed into the design of the game’s new systems. So for example, with customization, there are things you can spend a ton of time on if you wish, but there’s also a nice set of defaults to start from and good random league/team/player-generation tools, so you can get a lot of mileage out of it without a huge time investment.

In terms of graphical improvements, Super Mega Baseball 2 will be using PBR and “realistically scaled character models”.  What other improvements can we look forward to and how did you achieve these changes over time?

The original game (SMB1) was built by a very small team, and that meant only a very modest amount of time was spent building out aspects of the game’s appearance. With the second title, the team is a fair bit larger, and we started with a functional art pipeline this time. At the risk of oversimplifying it, SMB2 has a lot more triangles and pixels. The players have much higher resolution meshes and materials, the stadiums have been rebuilt at a level of detail far beyond the ballparks in the first game, and the game assets are just higher fidelity across the board.

How have the controls, physics and gameplay changed this time around? What is the overall atmosphere during games as opposed to the previous game?

We’ve tried to keep the control scheme fairly similar to the original, but the major change to the physics and gameplay is the scale. The ball and players are much closer to real-world proportions now and that creates space on the field for a lot more athleticism. Along with the changes to the proportions, the look and feel of the game has “grown up” a lot. It’s still light-hearted, but in a more mature way. We wanted to broaden the appeal of SMB2 to sports pundits who might’ve skipped SMB1 because it was too goofy looking on the surface.

What can you tell us about the Ego system and its difficulty levels? What are some of the challenges that players can expect?

The Ego system was a key tenet of SMB1’s design, and it’s fully intact in the sequel. You can still fine-tune difficulty to 100 possible settings for each of the games four main game mechanics (pitching, batting, fielding, baserunning). The influence of Ego on the outcome of the simulation has been tuned and expanded under the hood, like in how effective the AI is on rundown plays, or how effectively they will try to take extra bases when baserunning. But I think the most interesting application of Ego is in online play.

Ego is used in the game’s online, ranked 1v1 mode (called Pennant Race) to help facilitate competitive games between users of different skill levels. So for example you might get matched against someone who isn’t quite at your skill level, and both of you know the game is taking into consideration your history and setting your respective Egos accordingly, but the result is an intense and competitive game that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.

"The customization options in SMB2 blow away what was available in the original, with options for customizing leagues, seasons, teams and players."

What were the goals with cooperative season play and what prompted the decision to keep it at 2vCPU?

The idea was to largely replicate the experience of playing a co-op season on the couch. We just loved the idea that friends or family members could connect up on a regular basis and have that experience of making their way through an entire season play-through. While 3vCPU or 4vCPU would be cool, the game’s interface is built to support 1 or 2 players per-team. We want to nail the experience within that constraint before we consider adding more complexity.

What were some of the challenges faced for competitive online matchmaking in terms of balance, net code, etc.?

Two main things. We touched on one earlier – the game’s sliding-scale Ego difficulty system allows us some awesome possibilities for creating fair matches between users of different skill levels in match-made online play. But in practice, you need a lot of real-world data to balance such a system in a way that feels fair to users. The beta is helping with that!

Second, retrofitting netcode into a game that did not at all support the notion of networked play proved to be a very challenging engineering project. Game networking code is well understood these days, but the sheer volume of changes that had to be made to the way the game works at its foundational levels was massive. This was all going on at the same time we were heavily changing the proportions of the players in the game, so it was a lot of complexity to deal with at once.

With regards to team and league creation, what are some of the things that players can do this time around? How did you improve on the previous game’s options?

The customization options in SMB2 blow away what was available in the original, with options for customizing leagues, seasons, teams and players. That means new things like the team logo editor, uniform editor, player abilty editor, and full league editor where you can built out leagues of various sizes/structures.

How do you think the open beta will shape the gameplay?

The closed beta on Xbox One is bringing in a ton of great feedback. It’s helping us especially to sand off rough edges where new users don’t understand certain new game concepts, and it’s also helping enormously to smooth out the quality of the online experience and the behaviour of our servers – these are things that are just super hard to test thoroughly without a large group of users playing under real-world network conditions.

"We like image quality and resolution as much as the next person, but with the nature of SMB, we worship at the altar of 60fps."

What can solo players look forward to in terms of content? Will there be a meaty career mode to dive into?

While there is no career mode, the combination of the custom leagues, customizable Season and Elimination modes, and the fact that all of the game modes can be played socially adds up to a ton to do. With SMB2, we’ve obviously focused on the new multiplayer modes, but also on fleshing out the experience you can have in a “medium” amount of time – more than a one-off game but not as long as a full season play-through. The Custom Elimination mode in particular is great for setting up an experience that you can play through in one sitting or over a weekend.

How has the delay helped to improve the game? Are you track towards a final release date?

The delay allowed us to avoid shipping a rushed product. The game is in a substantially better state because of the delay, and we’re confident the extra time was well worth it. We’re indeed on track for the Spring 2018 release and there will be a release date announcement soon.

What resolution and frame rate will the base PS4 and Xbox One versions run at?

We like image quality and resolution as much as the next person, but with the nature of SMB, we worship at the altar of 60fps. So we’re always working under the constraint that the game must run at 60fps on all hardware variations. I hesitate to focus too much on resolution because image quality depends on so much more than that, but right now we’re upscaling from 900p to 1080p on the original Xbox One (i.e. UI is native 1080p) and at native 1080p on the base PS4. On the newer hardware variations, the resolution is currently 1080p, but at substantially higher image quality, especially on the Xbox One X.

When you think super-detailed games that push the current generation of consoles to their limits, Metalhead Software’s Super Mega Baseball 2 may not be the first game that comes to mind. The baseball title offers a more streamlined version of the game but you still have the ability to customize your team and play online.

However, it’s interesting to note how even developers like Metalhead are taking advantage of the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro, two consoles which currently represent the pinnacle of console graphics (more the former than the latter). GamingBolt spoke to studio co-founder Scott Drader and asked about the frame rate and resolution of the base PS4 and Xbox One versions.

Drader responded that although they like image quality and resolution, their target is always 60fps for Super Mega Baseball. “So we’re always working under the constraint that the game must run at 60fps on all hardware variations.”

Which isn’t all that different from games which focus on frame rate for fluid performance instead of pushing for the most realistic visuals. Resolution is also important but as Drader notes, image quality of a game is about other things as well.

“I hesitate to focus too much on resolution because image quality depends on so much more than that, but right now we’re upscaling from 900p to 1080p on the original Xbox One (i.e. UI is native 1080p) and at native 1080p on the base PS4. On the newer hardware variations, the resolution is currently 1080p, but at substantially higher image quality, especially on the Xbox One X.”

What are your thoughts about the focus on frame rate for Super Mega Baseball 2? Let us know in the comments.