Out of the Park Baseball 24 Review: A Home Run… For The Right Player
Growing up, I really didn’t like baseball. I’d go to a game if someone invited me, but the idea of watching a game on TV was about as appealing as staring at a wall. It felt like nothing ever happened. However, As I’ve grown older, the game has grown on me to the point where I watch it on TV regularly during the season. What I’ve realized is that as a child, I wasn’t wrong about little happening, but in many ways, that just makes it more exciting when something does happen.
Playing Out of the Park Baseball 24 really drives home how much happens behind the scenes to make those few moments of excitement occur in a game. A deep simulation giving you more control and options than I could have possibly imagined; it takes you deep into the business of running a baseball team while still giving you a lot of control over how you want to engage. It’s not a game for everyone, or even for every baseball fan, but for the right player, this could be your new obsession.
A Lot To Manage
It turns out, I’m that right player. My favorite parts of sports games have always been franchise modes, where I can take control of my team and lead them to unstoppable dynasties. Building a roster, managing my players, and adjusting to changing situations that’s my bread and butter. I sometimes like actually playing the games too, but the management aspect grabbed me as far back as NFL 2K1, and I still pick up the yearly NBA 2K titles despite having a lot of issues with them for this exact reason.
Out of the Park Baseball 24 takes those franchise modes I’ve always loved and cranks things up to 11. There’s so much to do here that, at first, I found myself rather overwhelmed, despite a number of very solid tutorials I was treated to as I started my first league. You have a ton of options to customize things and set up how you want to manage your team, but despite turning off what sounded like the things that would be a bit much for me, I still felt like every other day, a pop-up was coming up saying I had missed a step or needed to correct something. Even after spending a lot of time managing various teams, there are still aspects of player management that I’m not at all sure I fully understand.
Learning The Game
I learn more every time I jump back in, though, and OOTP24 has done more to teach me the fine details of baseball rules I didn’t fully understand than nearly a decade of getting interested in the sport. Roster management concerns, the way the minor leagues work, contract issues, these are all things I’ve had to deal with here, and at this point, I feel far more confident doing so than when I started. The side of my brain that wants to control every aspect of my team feels more confident by the minute that it can handle this, and sessions that would have been stressful at first are now exciting.
Players have so much control as well. You can jump into a modern team and move forward in time. You can fully customize a team if you prefer. Or, if you want to go back in time, you can pick a team from throughout history and see if you can make things go better for them. I jumped into the 2017 Cubs, the year after my beloved team broke their curse, to see if I could make their title defense go any better than it did in real life. The short answer was no, I couldn’t, but it was fun to try. The option to have historical transactions still happen was fun, too, like when at the trade deadline, we automatically traded for Alex Avila and Justin Wilson, a move I had forgotten all about six years later but which brought back fine memories and gave me some interesting tools to work with.
Room To Improve
While the management side of OOTP24 is everything I could ask for, there are aspects that are less appealing. You can play each individual game, but in truth, doing so grew old quickly for me. You’re not actively playing the game; you’re effectively managing each situation. Tell your batter if you want them to swing, but you don’t actually do the swinging. All of this is managed by a simulation and statistics, and that’s fine to a degree, but I didn’t find the moment-by-moment gameplay of it all that appealing, and watching the games, while not awful, often didn’t feel quite right as players would not react in seemingly obvious ways because the simulation said not too. Stronger presentation would go a long way to helping this appeal. Still, you can engage with this as much or as little as you want. Simulate through batters or even innings, popping in only for important moments as you choose, or handle every single possession. Even simulate through entire games, months, or even years if you prefer.
The other issue that I have with OOTP24 is Perfect Team, a card-based multiplayer experience that comes right out of the EA Sports playbook. Buy packs of cards, build a team of players, and compete with others online. That your performance is tied to actual MLB players and their real-life performance is an interesting twist, but the option to buy packs with real money is so blatantly pay-to-win that it put me off quickly. Even here, in one of the least obviously commercial sports games on the market, I can’t fully escape from the biggest problems infecting the genre. Players don’t have to engage with this mode, but I just with it wasn’t a thing, or at least that real money could be kept out of it.
Conclusion
Despite those issues, Out of the Park Baseball 24 is one of the most compelling sports simulations I’ve ever played. It offers enough guidance to help players get past the initial hurdle of complexity and really engage with the absurd number of systems and options on offer here. If you’re the sort of person whose favorite part of sports is often the numbers behind it, welcome to your new obsession.
Final Verdict: 4/5
Available on: PC (Reviewed); Publisher: Out of the Park Developments; Developer: Out of the Park Developments; Players: 1; Released: March 24th, 2023; ESRB: N/A; MSRP: $39.99
Full disclosure: This review is based on a copy of Out of the Park Baseball 24 provided by the publisher.
