I’m sick of series revivals. As an elder millennial, I am many, many reboots of classics from my childhood past the point of cynicism and fatigue now; new entries in my favorite series like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings barely move the needle for me anymore. That being said, this year’s Backyard Baseball game, the first entry in the series in over a decade, feels different.
The revival of Backyard Baseball is a wild story that’s worth reading about but involves an elementary school teacher looking for nonviolent games for her students, a private investigator, and most importantly, memories of playing Backyard Baseball in the late ‘90s. After meeting Playground Productions CEO Lindsay Barnett at PAX East 2026, I could tell that this revival was coming from a wholesome place rather than the cash-grabby nostalgia bait that I’m so used to. Bringing Backyard Baseball back was an ordeal in itself, but in order to be more than a novelty…the game has to actually be good.
Backyard Baseball is trying to hit a difficult pitch here—trying to both satisfy a new group of players and people like me who played the original run of games. So to begin talking about the game itself, it’s worth noting that even in its newest form, Backyard Baseball is still a game for kids. The pitches come in slowly with plenty of time to line up your swing; fly balls hang in the air for a long time; the kids run the bases extremely slowly; and you only have a handful of strategic options when hitting or pitching. This is a very easy game on the default difficulty, and that’s okay! It wasn’t made to be a competitor to MLB: The Show – it was made for kids who may or may not have played a baseball game before.
For those of us returning to Backyard Baseball with two extra decades of sports games under our belt, however, the higher difficulties provide more of a challenge. Pitches get faster, their movement becomes much more pronounced, and the precision of your bat aim and location of your pitches more important. After finishing a full season on the highest default difficulty (in which I lost a few games but was still eventually crowned champion of the known universe), I unlocked an even higher difficulty level, which was exponentially harder. It’s not a great balance, but it does provide a very arcadey challenge for those who seek it.
The games themselves are a good time, though I found them to be oddly low-scoring for such an arcadey-presenting game on that second-highest difficulty, with opposing batters swinging at balls out of the zone and tapping weak ground balls with regularity, and my own batters making relatively weak contact if I swung at suboptimal pitches. This added a nice element of tension and created some fist-pumping moments, like game-winning home runs. Sports games must always walk a challenging tightrope of providing tension while also always feeling fair, and Backyard Baseball usually managed to attain this balance.
The in-game experience does have some cracks, however. The opposing team’s AI is generally not good and is especially susceptible to manipulation on the basepaths. I found it difficult to control multiple baserunners at once, but with just one, I could reliably turn a single into a double, a double into a triple, and so on by baiting a throw to the wrong base in a way that feels cheap and not really realistic if we assume that these kids do actually know how to play baseball. When playing with a controller, I found the throw aiming to be extremely fiddly, often leading to my center fielder throwing the ball to the right fielder instead of a cutoff man or other infielder, due to the way that you have to manually aim at who you want to throw to. It’s extremely unlikely that you will ever need the center fielder to throw to another outfielder in general, so that seems like an unnecessary point of friction. If an opponent hit a ball into the gap in the outfield, it felt like a real win to throw the ball back to the infield as intended, and that doesn’t feel like the goal. I also could not figure out what I needed to do to fill the meter that unlocks a special hitting or pitching ability, so those felt more like random bonuses than something I could plan for. The pitching and hitting feel good, but these other second-to-second aspects of the game feel sloppy.
The cast brings back series icons like Pablo Sanchez (the greatest fictional athlete of all time), Kenny Kawaguchi, Kiesha Phillips, and the rest of the original characters, as well as retired MLB legends like Vladimir Guerrero Sr, Chipper Jones, Jason Giambi, and more. Each kid has things they excel at that make them feel unique, most notably their hitting and speed stats. Some of their depictions lean heavily into stereotypes, but they are just as often characterized by other things you may associate with young kids, like having a favorite doll or always being snotty-nosed. The game also features two play-by-play announcers who are a bit annoying, but again, this is a game for kids, so I’ll hold off on really judging that. I will, however, hand out a real demerit to the extremely repetitive dugout chatter, of which there is one line, “We want a batter, not a broken ladder!” that is repeated over and over and over and over again. It’s nonsense, it’s constant, and it grated on me very quickly.
