Majour League Baseball 2K11: Review

In case you don't have a PS3, Majour League Baseball 2K11 stands as your only quality choice among baseball video games, that is capable of providing a most satisfactory experience of hitting and pitching. Its “My Player” mode is rather a success after being expanded and made more interesting and accessible.

This newer release has lesser number of noticeable faults alongside its apparent graphical improvements. Yet, these improvement (so welcome especially for non PS3 owners) are done on very small scale and in tiny steps, and overall the game engine still looks (and sounds) pretty tired. Players are not likely to find a lot of novelty in MLB 2K11, as the developers preferred to build on and improve the already existing models rather than developing new ones.

Thus, the last year My Player mode has undergone considerable improvement. The player assigns the role of one of the team’s members and plays that character alone as he bats and fields. The opportunities for your character to earn stat points have been improved and increased. These changes allow building up your player easier over the course of just a few seasons. The Franchise mode, though having been added some features to (like more detailed trades and injuries and the opportunity to manage the player’s minor league divisions) still remain somewhat dull.

The improvement in the characters animation – less robot-like and closer to reality - both for hitters and pitchers is quite noticeable, as well as the fielding animations, though these two still fail to string together quite well. The stick controls for pitching and hitting used in MLB 2K11 are the same as in the last year’s release for the same range of moves, with hitting still being a major difficulty (but that’s what baseball is).

The difficulty the character encounters in the game may be altered through a large variety of options that allow changing nearly all aspects of the game, thus ultimately tuning the player’s baseball experience. Another good thing is that the Achievements are no longer accessible to Pro mode only but can be used to increase the score even if the player does not qualify for the big leagues.

And, finally, the commentator team of Gary Thorne, Steve Phillips, and John Kruk is the best feature ever found in sports games, even though the greater part of the dialogue is a recycled version of last year’s one and it gets repetitive before long.