Backyard Sports: Sandlot Sloggers

Another one of my American backlog games, Sandlot Sluggers is a baseball sports game in a cartoon fashion. In terms of similarity, style wise it’s the same as Rookie Rush but far less obnoxious in terms of achievements.

There are several modes to play in Sandlot Sluggers but for the achievements you only need to play story mode and play now to get them all so I won’t be mentioning the other modes.

The game was a real pain in the ass to learn how to play and even now, I’m not sure I know how to play the game. When you play Story Mode, you create your own character and then have to play with some really shit characters against teams that are better than you. When you beat them, you get a new team mate until you’ve formed your All Stars team and can take on the Bullies. It’s fairly contrived but serves to provide a story for a game that didn’t really need one.

The game play itself consists of pitching and batting. Pitching is simple enough. You have to throw the ball at the square on the screen by selecting a pitch type and using a power meter. The AI then rolls the dice regardless of what you’ve done and they will either hit the ball or not. Strike out three of their players with good fortune and then you can bat.

Batting is the same as pitching in that it feels like complete luck as to whether you hit a home run, hit the ball straight up in the air, get a strike out or just hit the ball into the field. There are various objects in some of the playing fields which will grant automatic doubles or triples but most of my wins felt like luck in the early game.

Aside from just batting and pitching, there are also power ups you can use. As a pitcher, they make the ball do weird things but again as you’re playing against AI in story mode, it’s up to the game whether this makes a difference or not. When in bat, you will get some abilities that mean the ball cannot be caught which is useful when the game decides you are going to sky the ball.

That’s essentially it for the gameplay. As mentioned above, looks wise it’s cartoony and sound-wise, the commentators are annoying but no where near the level achieved by the other games in the Backyard series.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 45 Achievements

9 of the achievements are awarded by default by playing through and winning in story mode. Loads of others will be unlocked along the way and the ones that aren’t – for completing specific actions during a game – can be easily set up with two controllers in Play Now mode.

There are some exceptions though, the most notable one being for winning every game via the mercy rule. This means that you have to set the game up so that the mercy rule is on, then you have to get a 10-run lead after the bottom of the inning to auto win without playing the whole game. Doing this for every game is a ballache, especially early on when your team is utter shit.

Another story mode one that’s a bit of a pain is for completing all the mini games and unlocking the boosts. The minigames themselves are really easy but if you fail one and skip, you will need to play all of them again for the achievement.

Some of the more notable Play Now achievements were painful too as they involved going through the entire roster to get the same player to score a single, double, triple and home run. I kept losing track of who had done what so every time a play finished, I was crossing my fingers that it was the right one.

A few others have you playing full five-inning games and performing specific actions at the end and it was here that the game started to drag. Getting the achievements in the easiest way involved striking out teams all the way to the final inning and then performing an action. Luckily this didn’t happen to me, but I could easily see going through the pain of getting to the fifth inning only to mess up the action and having to play through again.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Backyard Sports: Sandlot Sluggers hasn’t made me want to play more baseball games and on review of my collection there are still two more to play. I will be glad to see the back of them to be honest and certainly won’t be buying anymore.

That said, Sandlot Sluggers was a two-day completion clocking in at under 6 hours of play time so it’s not that bad for completionists.