MLB The Show 22 Review - Different Trailer, Same Ballpark

thegamer.com:

Reviewing sports games is both the easiest and hardest thing in games journalism. As far as how easy it is, these reviews can essentially be boiled down to two things - is it a successful simulation of the sport, and is it better than last year’s game. In short, when it comes to MLB The Show 22, the answers are ‘yes’ and ‘not really’. Now comes the hard part - explaining why.

MLB The Show is a pretty accurate recreation of baseball. Part of me misses the arcade feeling of The Bigs, but The Show is special because it gets pretty much everything right on a minute to minute level. The precision pitching method returns here and feels like the best possible recreation of pitching. Cricket games, the closest in the genre to baseball games, have never offered this level of tangible control. Likewise, batting offers a variety of inputs that work best for you, even if pitching is where the game shines. Fielding still feels comparatively basic, however.

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I also appreciate that The Show understands baseball is a very long game. I’ve long considered NBA 2K and FIFA to be kings of the sports sim arena, and it’s no surprise that these come from two of the fastest, most end-to-end sports on the planet. Baseball doesn’t have that, but The Show offers you the chance to play as few as two innings in some game modes, while others target specific moments (coming back from two runs down at the bottom of the sixth, for example). There are some purists who will want nine innings every game, but The Show does well to recognise that not everybody wants that experience.

The skill level works perfectly too with Dynamic Difficulty applied. With it, you start at the lowest level, though you can choose