Home Run High

Genre: Management Simulation

Players: 1

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Review:

Without a doubt the most prolific developer and publisher of Management Simulation games on Nintendo Switch is Kairosoft, who specializes in games with a retro-style isometric pixel art style, often with the word “Story” in the title. As of this writing, Kairosoft has released 61 games on Nintendo Switch, most of them Management Simulations.

After their earlier games, Kairosoft had established a few templates for their Simulation games that later games would largely follow. Game Dev Story established a Simulation-style game more focused on managing employee time and focus, Hot Springs Story established a Simulation style in line with Theme Park Simulators where you try to cater to guests’ tastes to maximize attendance and income, and Epic Astro Story established a Simulation style akin to games like Sim City, where you’re building out a town or settlement. I suppose it’s high time I update this with a fourth kind of template that grew out of Game Dev Story, a template that has you managing not employees but members of a sports team, something we first saw in Grand Prix Story.

As you might have guessed, Home Run High fits this fourth template, focusing on having you manage a baseball team, working on training them up and challenging other teams in the area. This game was originally released on mobile devices in 2017, then a port to Nintendo Switch in 2020, then to PlayStation 4 in 2021, then PC in 2022, and to Xbox One in 2024.

I like a lot of what this game does, actually feeling closer to a traditional Sports Management Simulation than Kairosoft’s sports-themed games often do. You not only manage training and recruitment (balancing this with time, energy, and budget restraints), but can also intervene it games on occasions to push your players to make a specific type of play. However, you can’t usually make specific directions, like telling a player to steal a base or focus on getting a specific runner out. or if you prefer, you can just sit back and watch your team’s game, which is surprisingly engaging.

However, I feel like there are problems with this game that didn’t get ironed out in testing, for some reason. As in many Kairosoft games, players are meant to be able to make improvements to facilities by using consumable items on them. However, for some reason this game refuses to let players finalize the use of these items, locking off a pretty important part of the game.

As for the presentation, as I mentioned above, this game makes use of Kairosoft’s signature presentation style using simple retro-styled pixel art visuals, paired with forgettable chiptune music and simple sound effects. Apart from the music, everything about this presentation is really endearing, though by this point we’ve seen more or less the same thing in numerous other Kairosoft games.

Overall, Home Run High had a lot of potential to be Kairosoft’s best Sports-themed Simulation game yet, but a lack of more specific control over your players during games and non-functional menus result in a game that feels broken and unfinished. As a result, I can’t really recommend this one.

tl;dr – Home Run High is a Management Simulation where players manage a baseball team and try to build up their skills as they take on other local competitors. This had good potential to be a great Sports Management Simulation, but a lack of more precise influence over players, and what appears to be a pretty major bug locking off an important part of the gameplay make for a game that’s difficult to recommend.

Grade: C-

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