It is more than fair to say that the flagship PlayStation baseball game, The Show has been treading water for the last few years. Well, Sony has stepped it up for MLB The Show 19 and made some improvements on the field as well as stacking it with awesome game modes. It is easy to see why people are calling this the best baseball game in years.
How to Download MLB The Show 19
You can download the game from PlayStation Store. Check out also our review of the previous installment of the series MLB The Show 18.
The Game Review
Let’s start by talking about what has improved on the field. It is really the fielding that Sony put the most time into MLB The Show 19. To start with the animations are improved and there is an overall less jerky feeling to the way the players move to the ball and react when it is close by. It is hard to explain, but it actually makes a huge difference.
Speaking of making a huge difference, the skill level of your outfield player will actually make a huge difference when it comes to getting the ball. Higher skilled fielders will have a line showing where the ball is going to go, lesser skilled players will still have to do a bit of guessing in this regard. This works wonderfully well and is a great way to make better players actually feel better.
The rest of the game plays great and while I would not say that Sony has reinvented the wheel with the rest of the game, to be fair they did not need to. I feel that the changes they have made to the fielding make this one of the most exciting The Show games in years. It is the kind of thing that you really have to experience first hand to appreciate how much better it makes the game.
Now let’s get onto the game modes. The first one I want to talk about is March to October, where has this mode been all my life? This at first glance sounds like a watered down version of a season mode, but it is a ton of fun. Many of the games will be simulated, but the game will make you play what it calls key moments. How you do in these key moments will dictate how the simulated games go.
There are different things that you will have to do as you play from March to October. These range from making sure a specific player has a good run to clinching a vital series that you are in the middle of. For a first try, this mode is great and it is exciting to think of how Sony can improve it for next year’s game.
The other big new game mode is called Moments. Moments is full of iconic moments from baseball history dating all the way back to Babe Ruth and going to the Cubs iconic World Series win. You will be given a series of challenges to complete and they are quite challenging, but a lot of fun. I love the presentation here with the older games where you play as Babe Ruth being in black and white!
The Road To The Show has been fully fleshed out and it now feels more like an RPG than a standard baseball sim. You take your character to the big time, but there is a detailed skill and perk tree to work with, tons of easy to hard challenges and there are these training session mini-games that you can use to boost your stats. You can expect to lose a ton of your social life to this mode.
With the new game modes, it is easy to forget about the Franchise and Diamond Dynasty, but they are both here. The franchise has seen very little added to it, but with the new game modes that really was to be expected. Diamond Dynasty is, well it is what it is! If you are into the online aspect and the collectible card game thing then I am sure you will have a lot of fun with it.
The presentation of MLB The Show 19 is impeccable. How they keep improving on it year by year is beyond me. One thing that really kicks things up a notch in the TV style presentation is the field side reporting that happens on occasion. This more than makes up for the somewhat repetitive commentary that happens as you play.
I feel that this is one of the strongest entries in the series for quite some time. I like the way the game actually plays and defending is actually a lot of fun. However, it is the two new game modes March to October and Moments that really took over most of my time with MLB 19 The Show. If you have gotten bored with the series, I really do think this is the game to win you back.
