Reviews of Backyard Sports: Sandlot Sluggers - Xbox 360

Customer Ratings:
List Price: $19.99
Sale Price: $16.99
Today's Bonus: 15% Off

The Good:

*Great cast of charters with different abilities

*Great-looking ballparks

*Wacky Power-ups give the game the arcade feel

The Bad:

*Minor gameplay annoyances

The Bottom Line:

If you have played this game last decade on your PC, you probably remember the characters Pablo Sanchez, Dimitri Petrovich and Vicki Kawaguchi and others. They are all back. It seems like they have grown up, too. In the PC version they seem to be somewhere in middle school and now they look a bit older, about early High School age. This is also supported by Pablo's ability to speak English(in the last decade's version he couldn't as was clearly stated in his bio.)

The Story Mode involves you making a character and going around other ballparks, beating other teams and stealing their captain before your final challenge of taking on the bully team. The game is fairly shallow in terms of replay value, but because it is a budget value game($29.99 opening day price,) the short burst of fun fits the price tag.

Minor annoyances are sometimes being out on a shallow hit to the outfield and all the fielders seem to have rocket arms. Mini games are also very shallow and quick.

At the end, this is still a good family game, especially if you like baseball.

Attention achievement hunters: Achievements are fairly easy and you should get all 1,000 in about 5 hours or so.

Click Here For Most Helpful Customer Reviews >>

Years ago I played the PC version of Backyard Baseball and loved it. The goofy charm of the characters, the purposefully corny play-by-play, the cartoonish "power-ups" that added a nice touch of fantasy, and the subtle (and not-so-subtle) use of sound effects all came together to create the look and feel of a friendly, neighborhood baseball game. Gone is all of that charm in Backyard Sluggers, a sterile, frustrating, and frightfully dull game, a mistranslation of its classically casual forerunner. Sluggers seems to swing and miss at every component that made the original game so enjoyable. Fielding is a nightmare of slow responses that turns ground balls into singles, pitching strategy is nullified by too-frequent, 2strike base hits and a kind of randomness (a fastball down the middle seems just about as effectiveor notas that curve dropped right on the corner), opposing teams field grounders like Ozzie Smith and have outfield arms like Roberto Clemente. The characters themselves are dull updates that do not speak, so there is no real attempt to give the players a personality, either. Hitting is marginally better, but with opposing teams full of Gold Gloves, you end up playing "small ball" no matter what. In another bad decision for Sandlot Sluggers, the play-by-play is now done by two weird adult characters who sit on a bench and have absolutely nothing funny or interesting to say. The original Backyard Baseball was not a perfect game, but it was colorful and playable two things that Sandlot Sluggers is not.

Best Deals for Backyard Sports: Sandlot Sluggers - Xbox 360

I got this game for my 5 year old daughter, she loves xbox and baseball so i said why not and for the price...forget it lol...we played together and it was a BLAST got lots of fast achievements, and had fun doin it...now we just went to story mode, and its on easy and seems like its rigged. Everytime she hits the ball they catch it its an out the second she hits it lol so it doesnt give her a chance to win i guess its a challenge??? But i even tried and u cant win! lol but it is worth the money if you dont get frustrated at story mode LOL overall good game!

Honest reviews on Backyard Sports: Sandlot Sluggers - Xbox 360

The original version of Backyard Baseball was fun to play and had great replay value. Season stats were a great part of the fun. In the new version, the creators seem to have taken all the good points of the original game and thrown them into the recycle bin; and kept just the bad parts. DO NOT SPEND MONEY ON THIS GAME. It is not very good.

Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for Backyard Sports: Sandlot Sluggers - Xbox 360

The disk arrived with no apparent damage to its packaging or scratches on the disk. However, when placed in my Xbox 360 it says unrecognized disk. It appears to be a genuine game disk in normal packaging. I am stuck in a remote place and returning a twenty dollar product isn't a realistic option. So I put it in a drawer and hope that maybe the disk will work in my Xbox 360 at home. I am guessing this is just a rare bad disk.