MLB The Show 22 Review – A Reliable Contender

Reviewed on: PlayStation 5
Also on: Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch
Publisher: PlayStation Studios
Developer: Sony Interactive Entertainment San Diego Studio
Rating: Everyone

MLB The Show 22 is a savvy veteran, a game that continues to perform well on the field, despite some modes feeling like they are falling behind the times. Developer Sony San Diego once again finds new ways to capture the realism of the sport and add even more excitement to the already fantastic batting and pitching battle. Given just how much content is here, not every mode received the attention we want, but Sony makes up for them with excellent new experiences.  

Down by a run in the bottom of the ninth, you are on the bench, unable to do anything other than chew on your nails and cheer on your teammate at the plate. In years past, in this moment, you'd be in the batter's box swinging for the fences, but it's now your friend's turn. Even without wood in your hand, sitting in the dugout as your friend tries to knock one out of the park is surprisingly intense. This experience unfolds in a wonderfully designed cooperative mode within Diamond Dynasty. Through this new avenue of play, MLB The Show nails the thrill of being on a team, giving you the chance to discuss strategies, execute hit and runs together, and hopefully scream in celebration when your buddy crushes a walk-off home run.

Cooperative play is great fun but surprisingly sparse in matchmaking options, allowing for just 2v2 and 3v3 matchups within the desired pitching and fielding difficulty groups – that's it. Given baseball is a nine-person game, it's disappointing that higher player counts aren’t supported, but the lower number creates more gameplay opportunities for each player. I applaud Sony's decision to alternate at bats from player to player, meaning you can't send your best-hitting friend to the plate in critical situations – it's always who's next in the order. I also like how cooperative play encourages spending time in other Diamond Dynasty modes to unlock better cards through card collecting, as the players featured on them are who you can send to the field.

Chasing elite diamond-ranked players is still a grind in Diamond Dynasty, but I didn't feel as strong of a pull to spend real money to buy packs of cards as much as I have in years past. Most of the modes offer excellent rewards that help build out the roster quickly. Most of the early recruits will be of the silver and gold variety, but you will get a few diamond-ranked stars early on.

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Conquest remains a satisfying avenue of play for card collecting and leveling. This mode's abridged three-inning format is better than ever thanks to A.I. rebalancing. Conquest's computer opponents now put on a strategic clinic, diving into the bullpen, using pinch runners, bunting runners over, and pitching to double plays. The balancing also affects your game, as pitchers begin to tire much faster – sometimes comically so after just a pitch or two. These are welcome changes that removes some of the repetition in gameplay motions.

If you love the three-inning format, Sony added another excellent mode for quick play: The aptly named Mini Season delivers three-inning games and a short 40-game season that you can get through in a weekend. It's an excellent addition that provides a nice selection of rotating missions but can be a bit frustrating early in your Show playing, as the A.I. teams you face replicate squads assembled by real Show players, meaning you could meet an all-Diamond team while you are still sending out gold and silver players. I developed a fun routine of bouncing between Mini Season and Conquest, a path that rewarded me with packs of cards and quick experience boosts for my rank and players.

As for the action on the field, MLB The Show 22 is once again a showpiece of iteration. Building upon an already great foundation, Sony continues to find ways to tighten up the play, add more realism, and reduce repeated moments. Variety is showcased within the the new fielding animations for all types of hits, the ways players charge balls, and new home run animations. It's also easier to read pitch release points, and the ball has a bit more weight to it, meaning you'll see more realistic ground ball hops and flight trajectories right off of the bat.

The feel of the play remains remarkably fluid, but don't be surprised if you walk more batters than you have in past iterations. There's a more pronounced penalty for missing Pinpoint precision, leading to the ball sailing out of the strike zone. As a pitcher runs out of gas, Sony makes you work in later innings, and you'll likely rely on bullpen arms more, a nice little way to keep you on your toes and change things up.

While making many strides forward, The Show 22 comes up a bit short in several areas. Repetition is a common theme in the commentary booth, consisting of two new voices: Jon Sciambi and Chris Singleton. They deliver great insight into the sport and play well off each other but don't have nearly enough lines. If a switch hitter comes up, don't be surprised if he's called a unicorn because you don't see many of them anymore. I believe I've heard this dialogue 50 times already.

Some modes also didn't receive much refinement. Franchise mode is largely unchanged, offering slightly tweaked trade block logic, payrolls based on 40-man rosters, and budget and contract improvements. Road to the Show is a repeat performer from last year but still delivers plenty of fun and the deep connected player experience to Diamond Dynasty.

Players looking for new meaty season-based experiences will find them in the vastly improved March to October mode. With the focus shifting away from "win now," you can take your team through multiple seasons, enjoy nicely streamlined drafting and team building, and focus on individual player efforts. I was surprised how much it scratched my Franchise mode itch.

A week after launch, MLB The Show 22's online performance is shaky, delivering periodic latency and hard crashes (sometimes without XP rewards). Online stability continues to be a huge hole in MLB The Show's yearly swing. While the new Switch iteration offers all the content of the PlayStation and Xbox versions, it suffers from framerate stuttering and significant graphical flickering. It's still playable and fun but doesn't carry the big lumber of its console brethren and feels like it's barely holding on.

MLB The Show 22 doesn't put up an all-star performance this year, but continues to be consistent in all avenues of play and finds new ways to make you want to spend time at the ballpark. Playing with friends in cooperative play is the standout feature if you can use it, but the on-the-field play and March to October also impress.

Score: 8.5

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Norco Review – Soul Food

Reviewed on: PC
Publisher: Raw Fury
Developer: Geography of Robots
Rating: Mature

Point-and-click games cemented the vast potential of interactive narrative at the turn of the century, employing innovative environmental/dialogue puzzles with evocative pixel art and chiptune music. Nowadays, we lose ourselves in impossibly large sandboxes with equally extensive choice-driven plotlines. It’s fitting, then, that Norco feels like a precious relic from the Sierra-led Golden Age of digital adventures. Geography of Robots’ debut title ponders unchecked capitalism and classism at the heart of America’s oft-neglected Deep South. Moreover, Norco’s retrofuturistic and net.art aesthetic is propped up by some of the best surrealist storytelling I’ve witnessed since Kentucky Route Zero.

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Norco reimagines the bayou as a series of interconnected nodes on a map. I bounced around numerous venues, parsing historical manuscripts in rundown shops, buying dog food at the convenience store, fetching hallucinogens from grimy bathroom stalls, and speaking with the citizens. Each vignette pops with psychedelic hues – rivers sparkle beneath the tree line, half-light casts long shadows across grassy knolls, watercolor-clouds form above the empty freeway. Norco’s writing might indicate that the city is distorted and diseased, but it’s gorgeous to behold, nonetheless.

Protagonist Kay returns just as her titular Louisianan community is on the brink of erasure. Kay’s younger brother Blake is nowhere to be found, and her estranged mother, Catherine, recently succumbed to cancer. In the months before her death, Catherine was conducting research on a floating anomaly at a nearby lake, earning the suspicion of evil oil conglomerate Shield. As Kay, I wandered through a weird, modernized Norco, hoping to find Blake and complete Catherine’s lifework. Norco teems with delightful twists and frightening realizations that brought me face-to-face with washed-up detectives and grotesque machines, among many other eccentrics. There’s a lot of dialogue and world-building, but the prose’s dreamlike and philosophical quality makes every block of text a joy to read.   

On the rare occasion that I had trouble keeping up with the lines, I accessed Kay’s “MindMap,” a smart subversion of the conventional quest log where important objects, NPCs, and locations are linked. Here, I could reminisce about significant events and relationships for additional details, progress the plot, or recall secondary objectives. Norco primarily touts puzzle-based gameplay, but don’t be fooled; the loop is chock-full of its fair share of nuance. At one point, a multi-part task required me to hover over backdrops with a cellphone camera to reveal invisible solutions, giving revisited areas an added level of depth and wonder. There are even peripheral puzzles that I could’ve missed if I hadn’t meticulously explored environments with my cursor, masterfully paralleling the enigmatic and illusory nature of the story.  

My one gripe with Norco is its tacked-on combat system. From time to time, Kay and her ever-growing band of party members – e.g., a stuffed monkey, a fugitive security droid, etc. – cross paths with aggressors. Attacks are minigames that range from replicating on-screen patterns to clicking enemy weak spots in timed intervals. I quickly grew weary of these redundant encounters. In a game packed with unique design choices, fighting paled in comparison, and I’m relieved there are only a handful of these sequences.

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I’ve never played a game like Norco, which elegantly celebrates and admonishes its cultural roots while simultaneously chronicling a strange doomsday scenario. Kay and Catherine’s shattered America is not so dissimilar from our own – burgeoning industrial complexes threaten to displace low-income families, automated systems supersede human workers, and the filthy rich work around the clock to deter upward mobility. The game isn’t always gloomy. One cool night, I sat atop City Hall and gazed at the constellations with a stranger. Hours earlier, I flipped through treasured memories on a faulty flatscreen TV. Norco is an unforgettable reminder that there’s an inherent beauty behind the madness.

Score: 9.25

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Persona 5 Royal Review – Revealing Its True Form

Reviewed on: PlayStation 4
Publisher: Atlus
Developer: Atlus
Release: 2020
Rating: Mature

When it launched in 2017, Persona 5 represented the next evolution of the Persona formula. Persona 5 Royal amplifies the stellar turn-based combat and masterful social mechanics, as well as the complex systems surrounding them. But it also adds new characters, story arcs, and a meaty post-game palace that ventures even deeper into the world’s lore to deliver the definitive way to experience Persona 5.

The gameplay loop of the original remains intact: You hunt for corrupted individuals, infiltrate dungeons based on their personalities, and battle through tons of enemies – all while going to school and developing relationships with various confidants. Connecting with people from all walks of life, learning their stories, and strengthening your bonds remains rewarding from both a character development standpoint and in the way these relationships give you useful perks. If you haven’t played Persona 5 before, this is the perfect way to start.

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Even if you did play the original release, Royal gives you plenty of reasons to return. In addition to restructuring the way you level up your relationship with Akechi, leading to more meaningful interactions with this important character, Royal adds Kasumi and Maruki, two all-new confidants. While I like the stories of both characters, I especially love the bonuses they give along the way: Kasumi increases your HP and gives you an awesome dodge ability for when a shadow is about to ambush you, while Maruki raises Joker’s maximum SP, which comes in handy during lengthy palace infiltrations.

Kasumi and Maruki offer humorous and heartfelt interactions, and while Kasumi eventually joins your party as a full-fledged Phantom Thief, that doesn’t happen until the new post-game palace. While I’m disappointed she isn’t in your party for the vast majority of the game, her constant presence in the story means you’re already familiar with her when the time comes. That new palace and its surrounding arc serve up an interesting look at the weird way the world works following the events of the original conclusion, and offers puzzles, dungeon elements, and is unique from the other palaces in the game. I was initially worried that the addition of a new final boss battle would take away from what made the original finale special, but without spoiling it, this new end boss delivers a climactic and cinematic endcap to your journey as the Phantom Thieves.

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In the 100 hours leading up to that post-game content, I loved revisiting the original palaces with their minor additions. Joker now has access to a grappling hook, which lets him swing to new points in palaces to find hidden treasure chests or the new collectible Will Seeds. Each palace’s three Will Seeds are often hidden behind grappling sequences, puzzles, or difficult battles, but if you collect all three and bring the resulting item to a new character Jose in Mementos, you earn valuable accessories to equip to your characters. While they all give you powerful perks or moves, my favorite was one that buffed an ally’s next magic attack to an extreme degree; I can’t tell you how many times that move helped me turn the tide of battle. As you progress through the story, you also accumulate Showtime moves, team-up attacks that play out through funny, over-the-top cutscenes that also have the capacity to get you out of hot water if you're in trouble in a palace.

Revisiting the memorable battles against palace rulers is made even more fun as they now have additional forms that play off the themes of their sins. Since the palaces are based on the cognitions of the palace rulers, I loved seeing how they incorporated the bosses’ transgressions and twisted views in unique ways. While each of these forms adds something exciting or compelling to the way the battles play out, one boss battle operates on a time limit, and Royal’s version adds additional dialogue and a new form without adding time to the clock, leading to frustration. Regardless of that one misfire, thanks to these additions, the palace boss battles are overall better than those in the original game.

With so many additions and improvements, Persona 5 Royal is an improved version of what was already one of the best RPGs of the last decade. Whether you’ve been itching to enjoy the Phantom Thieves’ journey again or looking to experience it for the first time, Royal wears its crown well.

Score: 9.25

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Concept: Get the Phantom Thieves back together for this director’s cut of Persona 5, which includes new characters, gameplay mechanics, and areas

Graphics: The visuals haven’t changed from the initial release, but even three years later, Persona 5 still oozes style and visual flair

Sound: One of the best soundtracks of the generation is supplemented by new tracks that diversify and strengthen the musical offerings. The new voice actors slide seamlessly into place with the already excellent cast from the original game

Playability: With complex social systems and superb turn-based combat already present, Royal adds gameplay enhancements great and small

Entertainment: While new characters and a new post-game palace are the biggest selling points, the tweaks and improvements make this the best way to experience one of the best RPGs in recent memory

Replay: Moderately high

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