Out of the Park Baseball 17
Now that I’ve put a few hours into this game, I feel qualified to give a competent review.
I have played baseball simulations my entire life. I played the Strat-O-Matic Baseball tabletop game as a kid, and I invested in the game on my Commodore 64. The limitation was that I could only buy one season at a time, and even back then, you could play a season pretty quickly on a computer. To keep playing, you had to buy additional seasons. That gets expensive in a hurry, and it’s one of the biggest reasons why Strat-O-Matic isn’t my game of choice anymore.
– Real player with 3643.4 hrs in game
Read More: Best Strategy Indie Games.
Out of the Park Baseball (OOTP for short) 17 is a text based baseball simulation. It contains features for historical gameplay, single player gameplay, custom universe/leagues gameplay and online multiplayer gameplay. The game allows you to take an active role in developing rosters and teams, or managing them. This is done through being a General manager, a manager and even play as the commissioner(you are able to play all three at once, or any combination of the two).
OOTP 17 offers new features over previous editions. They now have full support from MLB and MLBPA(obtained through licensing), so you will have accurate rosters, faces(done through facegen models) and with no worries that they will disappear. Simulation speed has been increased as the new code is allowing the use of multicore processors, which is a huge benefit. The AI also has been enhanced to be smarter in how they draft players, manage players, and develop teams. They will also make decisions depending on your goals and strategy. These are just some of the major changes that OOTP has offered over previous editions.
– Real player with 2670.9 hrs in game
Worms Crazy Golf
Background: I’m a casual fan of Worms game, love everything about it. I’ve played golf maybe 10 times or so in real life. I picked up the game on a humble bundle.
This is one sweet game. You have 4 18 hole courses to play in a 2d platform style. You choose your club from a driver, iron, wedge or putter, each behave differently and choose your angle and how much power to swing it.
You have a few different objectives, you need at least a Par to progress, although later with powerups its common to get hole in ones. You will need a great mix of strategy, powerups, planning, and luck to get it right.
– Real player with 45.4 hrs in game
Read More: Best Strategy Casual Games.
Worms Crazy Golf is, as the title suggests, a golf game in Team17’s Worms universe. It is not a serious golf game, like for instance Tiger Woods PGA Tour or Links, but a more wacky 2D golfer keeping with the series comical tone and graphical style. Supposedly it is a sequel to the 2004 mobile game Worms Golf, but who cares, right? The object of the game is to complete each hole on par or below par with its par number. If you fail to do so you have to play the hole again. There are three courses (four with the added mini expansion Carnival Course) that contain 18 holes each. Once in awhile you get to play extra challenge levels where the object can be to keep the ball in motion for a certain time or to pop all balloons, etc. These challenges are quite fun and can be a good break from the normal levels.
– Real player with 18.7 hrs in game
Blood Bowl: Chaos Edition
This game falls in one of two categories: You will love it immensely, or you will hate it and wish you never played it.
For starters, it has a tremendously high learning curve. I’ve put my share of time in with both this and the legendary edition and I’m still learning new tactics. Couple that with every single team having their own specific playing style that you need to learn to a certain degree, and you have a death sentence for a new player that isn’t patient enough to actually learn the ins and outs of the game.
– Real player with 224.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best Strategy Games Workshop Games.
You will discover new swear words you never knew you needed.
This game is frustrating. Let me say this right off the bat. It. Is. Frustrating. Between the rather convoluted rules and the insane randomness. This game is a pain to get into., especially if you’re unfamiliar with the table-top or previous incarnations. The tutorial helps a little buut the ingame documentation is done in absurdly fine print and is a pairn to read. this is one of those games where you will do most of your learning via play and by play I mean getting your ass handed to you a few times. Once you do learn…the game becomes deliciously satisfying. Still frustrating as hell but the furstration makes the successes all the more satisfying.. Oh there is nothing so great as tackling a guy on the opposing team and sending him to morgue.
– Real player with 161.5 hrs in game
Blood Bowl 2
I see a lot of negative reviews from people who have played the original blood bowl games which I can’t comment on due to BB2 being my first experience of the game, all I can say is that I love it, if I’ve got free time it’s my first, second and third choice, and if I’m not playing I’m watching a stream :)
Pros:
1. Incredibly deep gameplay/strategy, after 600 hours I still feel like a noob, every team can be developed differently according to how you like to play, and more than half the teams haven’t been released yet so still plenty of variety to come.
– Real player with 2055.4 hrs in game
Yes I do recommend this game. Yes I probably should take a rage management treatment due to the random nature of the game… STILL, like Poker… this dice game REALLY reward skill, but sometimes the game “deals” you a crappy hand… and then close to anybody can beat you.
Some really love Blood bowl and give it 10/10… some don’t… It’s abit sad that many of the reviews here are made of unexperienced gamers. And if you find the game too expensive - just buy it on sale!?
Unpatient or timid gamers should not play this game. You will experience that the PvP is very hard for new coaches. The skill level of the more experienced coaches are really high and they will punish every mistake. You move 11 players on the pitch in a conversion of a table top game. Turn based, 16 turns each. All the time you need to make risk calculations and use your logic and tactical skills. Read the player/race guides out there, it will help you alot developing your skills! The game should be of course played vs real human opponents… not the AI.
– Real player with 1776.7 hrs in game
Blood Bowl - Legendary Edition
For sale on steam: Membership to a cult.
Specifically, the cult of Nuffle - Chaos god of random shit happening in an amusing way.
Welcome to Bloodbowl, a turn based tabletop sports game/religious ceremony of Nuffle based off the Warhammer fantasy boardgame of the same name.
For those unaware of Bloodbowl and what it is. It is essentially what happens when you take (American) football and set it in the Warhammer universe. For those who don’t know American football, players take a ball and try to run it into the opponent’s endzone, at the other side of the field.
– Real player with 107.9 hrs in game
Oh boy, this f#cking game. I must be honest, all I knew about this game is that it was violent, and that I had played a demo around 8 or so years ago. And well, seeing it with a big sale like that, I couldn’t really hold it and decided to buy it. Is it bad? Is it good? As usual I’m gonna start talking about what it does worse, then move up from there.
First and foremost, the worst part of the game has to be it’s difficulty for new players. It’s a board game of sorts directly ported to a video-game… But as it usually happens, good board games are complex as all hell, and that translates poorly for new players. It also doesn’t help that the difficulty spike is directly at the start: you create your own team and then suddenly you’re thrusted with little knowledge of how to play against teams that actually DO HAVE QUITE THE LEVEL ALREADY. Your team will be on a sick losing spree from the beggining because, even though the game says there’s around 140 or so teams on the game, you’ll be playing against the same mid-level ones over and over. If I start on a 0 prestige league, WHY THE HELL PUT MID-GAME TEAMS ON IT, EVEN ON THE LOWEST DIFFICULTY!? IT’S STUPID. However that’s switched around later, when your team actually gets levels and becomes decent, the enemies are actually rather easy to predict.
– Real player with 77.6 hrs in game
Frozen Cortex
I like this game. Don’t let the sports facade fool you; if you like turn based strategy, this game has a lot more depth than first glance suggests.
Full disclosure: I was on the closed beta, so I’ve had more direct contact with the devs than your average player. My perspective may be biased.
As a fan of Frozen Synapse, I was expecting more of the same this time around. The first couple weeks of testing showed promise, but the sports theme turned me off, and the absolutely brutal AI made it difficult to enjoy. They’ve since tuned the AI and match settings to be more accessible at the beginning, and even more ridiculously difficult at the highest levels.
– Real player with 82.0 hrs in game
Frozen Endzone (possibly soon to be Frozen Cortex) is a brilliant new type of game from Mode7Games. It mixes sports with the turn-based action of their previous entry into the market, Frozen Synapse. Players plan their players moves, can plan opponent’s moves to see what will happen, and then submit their turn. Meanwhile, their opponent does the same planning process, and then after both players have submitted their turn, the game calculates and displays a result. Best part is that you never have to be online at the same time as your opponent!
– Real player with 78.7 hrs in game
Franchise Hockey Manager 4
Not worth the money! Too many bugs of different kind. It keeps crashing all of the time. So I started saving more often. But the thing is that it also keeps crashing in the middle of the saving process. A lot of the times I can’t even start my save. It loads halfway through and crashes. When that happens I have to search for the automatic backup files in a folder inside the save folder (there are two of those backup folders) and copy the backups content over to the main save folder. That usually works! But now, after the lates update, those backup folders had mystically disappeared and ALL the boxes in the settings were disabled, including the function that automatically saves backups. HOW could I have known that without any warning messages after the update..!? SO after hours of playing, my save file won’t start and there’s nothing I can do to fix it. Wasted time and money! If you DO buy the game, make sure to make tons of your own backup files and save every minute or so. I know, it will be a pain in the a**…
– Real player with 2394.1 hrs in game
So this game was much better than FHM 3 IMO, a lot more dynamic, and more options. I also feel like it’s a lot easier to navigate. I have 5 season played as the leafs, with 90 hours on record. I’m really enjoying my time on the game so far. WITH THAT SAID, a couple things where I feel the game could improve (sorry if they’ve already been said);
The sim speed is slow. It takes quite a while to get through the offseason, i usually just have to go AFK while simming through it, as it takes upwards of 20 mins. I have a GTX 960, Dell Inspirion gaming laptop, so it’s not my Rig.
– Real player with 640.1 hrs in game
World Boxing Manager
I’m going to give it a thumbs up because I think the concept is so great and some of the mechanics really are right on for a boxing sim. It’s worth those of us TBCB lovers to look into as an alternative, especially since that title appears to have died. But there are some serious flaws and it can be very, very “grindy” at first. And there is a serious lack of instruction that comes with the game but fortunately that is alleviated some by a great guide that is available.
Some examples of the lack of info:
– Real player with 214.4 hrs in game
This game is a hidden gem on Steam.
Let me start by saying I’m not a fan of the Steam review system. Quite often you see reviews from people with less than 1 hour in a game and whether positive or negative there’s just no way that review is accurate. There’s also the possibility of abuse and I think most of us have seen that as well. It’s just not a trustworthy way of knowing whether a game has value or not. Playtime versus Price. That’s the best way to judge a game imo. As you can see from my hours played this game has that in abundance.
– Real player with 117.5 hrs in game
Bowl Bound College Football
First let me say I am huge fan of many “text based” sims – from OOTP series to FM Manager. This game doesn’t have nearly the bells and whistles of a AAA title like OOTP or FM series but it compares favorably in many ways and in some ways falls quite a bit short.
The biggest annoyance by far is the frequent crashing and lack of hyperlink based navigation. The game seems to have a memory leak and will freeze every other season or so. This would be a huge deal if it had auto save feature and/or didn’t require a entire system reboot in order to come back. Luckily I have learned to frequently save and the game does always load after a reboot – haven’t lost a single save yet (knock on wood).
– Real player with 4003.9 hrs in game
Ther is so much about this game I love. At first, about 3 seasons, I had the computer run alomst all operations of the game, I only played the weekly games as coach. This worked fairly well, but soon I wanted to learn more. I watched a few videos showing how to play the game (can be found by clicking the link found i the User Guide [?] at the top of the menu).
I started to take control of the Recuiting. It has now become my favorite part of the game. One warning, it’s very heart breaking to recruit a player who in the last moment goes elsewhere. My first season of recruiting was not very success. I could bearly get anyone who was Average. The second year I picked up 2 Five Stars and about 4 Four Star players. I went from having about 109th Recruiting Rating to (4 seasons later) being 39th. I rarely play (manually) more than 3 series of play before I Exit the game and let the Sim game take over.
– Real player with 2927.3 hrs in game
Astonishing Baseball Manager 20
Astonishing Baseball 20 is a great game for those who like/love baseball but don’t understand how the salary cap will affect the farm team vs the triple-A team. AB has just enough depth to keep your attention without drowning in deep UI data tables. Check it out!
– Real player with 23.2 hrs in game
First and foremost -thank you dev and publishers for efforts made to this game- i would like to point out ,it’s probably my 3rd baseball game,as i like baseball in real life.Modern Ui,simple ,straight to point,easy to navigate,background music which relax even the most hardened soldier with a cigar ,flexibility,you can custom teams,create legends,write history or simply have a casual sunday bam-bam with the leading baseball stars.Yeah,have no doubts ,this is slowly becoming one of the coolest baseball games,and dev listens to everyone and tries his best. Put your favourite cap, the gloves and grab your fav stitched ball just as i did and let’s get down to innings.Oh yeah ,enjoying the sound of the crowd,the sound of the ball hitting the baseball bat ,imagine your team mates shouting and the heart beats like a drum.
– Real player with 9.7 hrs in game