The Fielder's Choice

Reviewing (mostly) every game (or DLC) in my library, part 645: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️☆☆☆☆ (6/10) To be frank, I probably shouldn't be giving [i]The Fielder's Choice[/i] a thumbs up. It has many obvious flaws: rushed pacing, thin characters, uneven character progression, possibly frustrating mechanics, and the whole experience is over in about an hour. By most objective measures, this should be an easy "not recommended." And yet. .. I can't bring myself to do it. [i]The Fielder's Choice[/i] was clearly made by someone who loves baseball, and as a baseball fan myself, that passion is infectious. The game is packed with details that most sports games wouldn't even think to include—WAR, xFIP, arbitration, roster decisions—and it feels like it was written by someone who understands the sport beyond the box score. I had a great time with the "gameplay" side of things, and I do think it was worth an hour of fun! Whether you think an hour is worth it is up to you. [b]Thank you to the staff for giving me a free review copy![/b] [b][h2]Pros:[/h2][/b] ✅ [b]Excellent descriptions and writing.[/b] The prose does a fantastic job capturing what it actually feels like to pitch. Instead of simply tellin…

This is an interactive story purely for baseball fans. If you're not a major league fan (heh) of America's pastime, you probably won't even understand it. You play as a pitcher newly debuting in the major leagues; you can choose between being a prodigy (easy difficulty) or merely typical (hard difficulty). While there are choices that determine the direction of your career, you'll be spending most of your time on the mound, choosing which pitch from your repertoire is appropriate for the situation. It's a nice simulation, though it's finished pretty quickly. You can play as a male, female, or nonbinary character; this makes no difference. Any gender can date any of the game's romanceable characters, but you shouldn't expect a romance story. The only important relationship in this game is between you and your throwing arm.

Soft recommend, way too short for my liking. You never really get to know the characters around you and the aspect of building your character's throwing repertoire felt lacking. There are so few chances to determine your character traits that I only realised it was possible at the end of the game. Each season flies by and its hard to differentiate one from the other. Opportunities are missed in terms of creating rivalries within your team or with other teams' players. However, it's still a fun story and worth playing if you like baseball.

Took me 6 years to get around to it, but it's alright. As you can see it's a short game. I did a complete playthrough in that .9 hours. Your character retires seemingly pretty early and arbitrarily. My last season was my best. I'd gone 18-4, won a 3rd championship, learned a new pitch that was unhittable, and my player decided, nah, I was gonna retire. I'd been in the league 7 years so couldn't have been older than 32 or so at most. I'd have liked it to be deeper and emphasize the baseball game decisions more. I mean it's up in the air. It's a decent hour of entertainment but it's only an hour. Whether that's worth it is up to you.

I can't give The Fielder's Choice a glowing recommendation, but overall I had a pretty good time with the game. This is an entirely text-based interactive story about your life as a pitcher, and I suppose you mostly have to ask yourself if you sound like the target audience for that sort of experience. The story itself is somewhat shorter than I expected and once you play through the game a time or two it becomes repetitive, even while making mostly new choices about your baseball career, but I enjoyed figuring out how to modify my abilities to unlock each of the achievements.

not real,what inglourious basterds is to WW2-this is to basseball.