The Bigs is back and is better than it's predcessor in many ways.
By TheGamerGeek 4 Comments
The look of The Bigs is very close to the look of many other arcade sports games, ie Blitz, Slug-Fest, etc. During the "legendary catches," the animations for the players are very recycled. You very rarely see a new one after you get through about 3 games. It's hard to give the graphics a real "yes it's good" or "no it's bad," cause it's a very you either love it or hate it type style. I personally thought they was not too many problems with them. I ran into little to no choppiness, they stayed smooth the entire time. The batting and pitching is all very sharp. The new "Wheelhouse," where a little of the plate is highlighted to where if the pitcher throws it in that area, you having a higher chance of hitting it is actually pretty interesting. It's really risk/reward, the pitcher can throw it there and if you miss your swing, the pitcher gets more turbo for being ballsy.
Fielding in The Bigs is simple fielding but when you go into the aforementioned "Legendary catch" mode, you're given a mini-game to complete so that you can make the catch. They range from, pressing 4 buttons in succession, to holding a button and releasing it at the right time, and sometimes even balancing a small ball on a beam using the R2/RT and L2/LT buttons move the beam back and forth. It's all very interesting and makes for very stressful situations. During the game you have a Big Blast bar which, when filled up can go into a mode where the chances of you hitting a home run is very much increased. But if you let it fill all the way up you can do a Big Slam, you then go into a rapid fire, 4 straight pitches that let you fill the bases for a Grand Slam. The amount of depth thrown into this arcade game is mesmerizing. The big feature of Home Run Pinball from last year, is in this one but there is no noticeable changes that I can see.
While graphics are all fun and good, the "Become a Legend" mode, which is pretty much their version of Road to the Show from MLB The Show, you start out working games in Mexico then proceed to the bigs and play games while they give you little goals to complete before you advance. Other games have tried to do that in the past but none have really succeeded like The Bigs 2 does. They manage to give you tough challenges but to the point where you won't have to re-play a 5-inning game over and over. Before you go into the game, you have to create your character, which gives you normal options, tall or short, fat or skinny, tattoo's or not, etc. During the career you perform mini-games that will increase your stats. All of them are very good and well balanced besides contact's mini-game. What you do is the computer is just tossing balls up in front of you for a long time and the person on the opposing side is just God when it comes to hitting the balls so you have to get a great groove of hitting the balls at just the right time. It took me an hour to beat only level 2 of the contact mini-game, there is 5-6 levels.
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