Owen S. Good
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Writing For
Polygon Latest Reviews
Even with simplified grappling and submission controls carried over from the last edition, EA Sports UFC 3 is probably the least pick-up-and-play game in the sports genre. It takes real dedication, and understanding of one’s fighter, to draw out the game’s virtues. But they can be found in the anticlimax of a career bout that ends in a fraction of the time spent training for it. For those who can take a staggering punch and remain focused on their game plan, EA Sports UFC 3 is as close as it comes to professional fighting, without the bruises and welts.
Coupled with a desert city and countryside that feels lifeless despite being packed with racing challenges and collectibles, it’s the equivalent of a bland paint job surrounding a high performance engine block. Considering how little I customized my cars in Need For Speed Payback, much less wanted to, that’s the best epitaph I can give it.
But FIFA 18 is still seductively deep and delivers excitement. It gave me the feeling that there is still so much to learn about what appears to be a rather straightforward sport, and that the game would gladly help me understand. This is always the time of year when I ask myself why I don’t just spend all of my time playing FIFA, and FIFA 18 poses the question more forcefully than ever.
It’s in the sparks coming off the skid blocks in the uneven pavement of Shanghai’s backstretch; the drumroll of the kerb as I hit my racing line just right, the lens flare of a midsummer sunset making an easy bank at Silverstone into a perilous wide turn and a sudden fight with Daniel Ricciardo. It’s in the feeling that, after Codemasters has gotten so many things right about the thrill of racing, I can too.
NBA Playgrounds is very nice to look at, and its roster has a strong depth that any basketball fan will appreciate. But rather than build a game with hilarious, rollicking action and balance out how that is scored and defended, NBA Playgrounds imposes condition after condition on the users and cripples any chance at consistent fun. Those who pine for the flame-throwing slams of NBA Jam or the outrageous street trickery of NBA Ballers in days past will have their hopes buried under a pile of bricks by NBA Playgrounds, as their gamepad vibrates like an ignored phone call.
That’s what’s so frustrating about grading a game like Drawn to Death. I know it could do better if it applied itself toward the little things it doesn’t like doing as enthusiastically as the things it does.
MLB The Show 17 continues one of the longest-running successes in sports video gaming, and it’s not a regression. But its advances sound a lot bigger on paper than they are in practice. The gestures made to Franchise and Road to the Show are nice, but the enjoyability in those modes still mainly rests on good design choices going back years. Time will tell if the changes to MLB The Show 17 establish a new foundation for what is enjoyed five years from now. In the present, though, it is still a richly illustrated, seductively appealing depiction of the National Pastime.
None of that diminishes Super Mega Baseball as an arcade sports video game for the ages, worthy of the likes of Tecmo Super Bowl, NBA Jam, Mutant League Football and Backyard Baseball. No sports video game of 2014 approached its subject with as much imagination as Super Mega Baseball. In such a rigid genre with high barriers to new ideas, this game is a legitimate breakthrough.
These are petty complaints, but the fetishization of minute details has been practically the only selling point for MLB 14 on PS4, and there simply aren’t enough fulfilled here to make it a compelling experience above what the PS3 already has established. With cloud-saved Franchise and Road to the Show files transferable to future editions, baseball fans who have already begun on the PS3 can wait ‘til next year.