Arc Style: Baseball 3D

Genre: Sports (Baseball)

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local Wireless, Download Supported)

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Review:

Arc Style: Baseball 3D is a Baseball game released on Nintendo 3DS in 2014 following up 2012’s Arc Style: Soccer 3D with a similar blend of simple 3D visuals, chibi characters, and accessible gameplay.

The presentation here is not especially impressive. Both the characters and the stadiums they play in are extremely simplistic-looking, and for a game that touts its “3D” in the title, it doesn’t do much to actually impress with its stereoscopic 3D effects. Likewise, the sound consists of one extremely repetitive, annoying “sporty” song and a heavily-accented umpire calling plays, with a few sound effects here and there. Even for an inexpensive baseball game, this is pretty disappointing.

At the very least, this game’s batting mechanics are solid. You’re given an indication where you’re focusing your swing and must move it to where the ball is headed in time to connect. You can also change out the type of swing you make for more challenging powerful swings if you like. Pitching is more or less the same thing, and mostly works well. Unfortunately, you have very little control over the type of pitch you throw – you can only do fastballs, slow balls, and curveballs. The lack of control over the outfielders is disappointing too. You need to time a button press to catch the ball, but don’t control outfielders’ movements, only where they throw.

There’s not much in the way of extra content here either – you have single-game exhibitions, tournaments, and the ability to edit your team, including editing individual players. But that’s about it. At the very least the game’s multiplayer supports Download play, but honestly I can’t imagine getting a friend excited to play this game.

As a simple, accessible baseball game, Arc Style: Baseball is functional, but doesn’t do anything particularly original with the genre, doesn’t give players much control over the outfielders, and is visually ugly and sounds bad to boot. At the very least the batting mechanics are satisfying, but that’s not really enough to carry an entire Baseball game. Unless you’re a huge fan of the sport, skip this one.

tl;dr – Arc Style: Baseball 3D is a simple Baseball game with ugly visuals, poor sound, lacking in features, and with gameplay that largely lacks nuance. The hitting mechanics here are quite good, but pretty much everything else is largely disposable. Unless you’re a diehard Baseball fan, this isn’t a game you should bother with.

Grade: C-

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