MLB Dugout Heroes aims to be an accessible, arcade-like experience that puts players in the shoes of Major League players and allows them to take on a less-hardcore experience to America’s Greatest Past Time. The game is incredibly successful in this regard, distilling the sport of baseball into an interactive point-and-click that is easy for anyone no matter your age, but also incorporating advanced, RPG-like functions to keep you coming back for more.
The meat of the game is in the online mode where you pick a team, or create a dream squad, and face other human opponents to level up your club and players and move up the ranks. All of this is free to play, you earn NUTS as you progress and complete objectives, this currency allows you to collect unique items, power-ups, etc. The commercial aspect of the game allows you to accelerate this collection by purchasing currency and turning it in for these perks. You’ll notice that some of the items are purely for aesthetics, others are a boost to performance, while it remains to be seen if these items will give players an unfair advantage, and it could only be temporary as devout gamers collect NUTS and, in turn, the items.
Online play, as mentioned, is the core of the experience. You enter into a lobby based on your current level. As you progress and play games, you’re able to move up. Starting off you’re restricted to playing with similar skill level players, to keep the field even and not having newbie’s be ganked by those with powerful rosters and tons of perks. Every player can create a Room where a stadium, number of innings, time of day, etc. can be customized. Once you create a room, or join a pre-existing one, a ready-check is initiated and the game begins. Like a real baseball game, players take turns pitching and hitting allowing the AI to take over certain aspects of fielding.
Both pitching and hitting are accomplished by using the mouse inside a “strike-zone”. For hitting a player lines up an oblong shaped oval to where they believe the ball will be, and are tasked with timing their swing appropriately. Pitching is a bit more interactive. Every pitcher has a certain number of pitches (more which can be unlocked by playing games online). The player chooses the type of pitch, clicks where the ball should be delivered, and a timing bar similar to those seen in golf games appears where a bar scales up the bar and comes back tasking the player with clicking on a sweet spot to deliver a perfect pitch. The game alerts both players if the pitcher fails this timing task, meaning the ball will probably be delivered in the middle of the strike zone, ripe for the batter to rip it out of the park.
As previously mentioned, the game’s AI takes over for most fielding until the player has secured the ball, using the WASD keys on the keyboard the user dictates which base the ball should be thrown to. These keys can also be used when batting to steal bases or for the pitcher to initiate a pick-off attempt.
Luckily the game is a lot of fun to play, because the visual and audio departments are sorely lacking. While the game is a conversion of an Asian game, and the simplistic graphics can be attributed to that, there just isn’t a lot of detail put into anything beyond the low-poly count character models and simplistic textures. The fans are 2D sprites which is painfully obvious when hitting foul balls, the stadiums are detailed enough, but not an ultra-realistic representation you’d find in MLB2K9. Granted these short comings are to keep the client size down, but it is disappointing when there are much better looking games on the market. Curiously there is no support for widescreen resolutions, even though one is listed in the options; a box informs you that it is not supported.
The biggest hurdle a player will have to overcome is the horrendous commentary. While sports games have never been able to fully capture the rapport of two guys in a box talking about the game, Dugout Heroes takes bad to new heights with a low number of samples and inane dialog. In a three inning game you’ll hear the same four lines over, and over, and over again. After every bottom half of an inning you’ll always here “That was three outs, which means its time for an inning change” Duh. Everyone knows that, and if they didn’t they knew it after the first inning, there’s no need to tell me it again after the second, third, fourth, etc. At times the commentary just brings the whole experience down, turning it off, or your speakers completely off will save yourself the frustration.
If you’re able to overcome listening to the action, you’ll find a fun, accessible baseball game under the surface. There’s a lot to play around with in both single player and multi-player modes, lots of items to collect and the RPG-lite elements give you a sort of front office manager mini-game with substitutions, resting overused players, etc. There’s a lot to like here, and while it might not look like much, and sound even worse, the gameplay is solid, and in the end, that’s all that really matters.
