While I’m not the biggest sports gamer outside of hockey and golf games, I must confess that I’m a sucker for weird takes on familiar sports. NBA Jam was awesome for its exaggerated full-court dunks and flaming nets. I loved Base Wars on the NES with its robot teams. Heck, I even liked Mega Man Soccer, because who even thought that was a good idea? So when I saw the concept of Baseball Warriors, a new management simulation game from Taiwanese developer MoaiCity, I pretty had to play the game and get some video for you all to check out.
The basic idea here is that you are the manager of a baseball team composed entirely of characters from the popular Chinese Romance Of The Three Kingdoms stories. In most of the game’s modes, you don’t actually control any of your players. Instead, you choose who you want in each position on the field and the game will play out for you. It’s pretty hands-off, but if you want to get in on the action, there’s a Homerun Derby mode where you get to control the batter.
The game is free-to-play, and uses a lot of familiar social RPG elements. The gatcha draws in this case are the players themselves. Better players yield better results, of course, and I think it would be kind of fun to collect all of the principle characters from the historical legends. Sure, it doesn’t look like the deepest game, but sometimes you have to slow down and just enjoy the strange ideas you come across in this hobby, even if only for a few minutes. I’ve been assured Baseball Warriors will be getting an English release in early 2016, so watch out for it if you’ve ever wanted to see Cao Cao stand on the pitcher’s mound and strike out Yuan Shu in three precise pitches.
