Playball

Playball feels like the baseball games I played growing up. There was one of the R.B.I. Baseball games that I sunk a lot of time into, and there’s definitely another life where I was a professional baseball player because of it. Or maybe Banana Ball. I played a bit of the DOS-based R.B.I. Baseball 2 on MyAbandonware today (in-browser DOSBox, amazing) to confirm my feelings about it, and, yep, still great stuff.

In Playball, you pick your team from a huge number of individuals, each with their own little quirks and personalities. There are a handful of different fields you can play on, too, each with their own gimmicks. Like, one has tall buildings past the outfield, and if you break a window you’re out. Or there’s an ocean back there to aim for where no one’s catching it. It adds some randomness to the whole thing, and even a perfect hit might not get you the home run you thought you clinched.

The actual baseball action is straight up, old-school baseball video game. You control the pitcher or the batter, depending on what half of the inning you’re in. Pick your pitch and control the ball in mid-air a little to try and trick the batter, or move around the batter’s box and nail the timing. There’s no up/down to the pitches (well, the breaking ball will make it drop at the plate, but you can’t control it beyond that), and a lot of it is reading your opponent and getting the timing down. It’s really fast-paced play, and the longest wait time in the game will be just waiting for some of these pop flies to finally drop.

The league mode has 7-inning games made to be cruised through as you work toward the championship, or you can do one-off exhibition games with whatever game options you want. There’s a practice mode, too, and it’s a good way to get a feel of where you’ll want to position yourself in the batter’s box to ding home runs without getting caught out in the outfield.

All in all, it’s a very straightforward baseball game with some good personality and depth. You’ll have to switch out pitchers when your opener gets tired, and rearranging your batting lineup to load the bases before sending in your slugger is a great way to get some runs on the board. The feel of it will remind you of how baseball games used to be, with the deluge of stats taking a little bit of a backseat to the head-to-head battle of a pitcher/hitter dynamic. It’s Backyard Baseball in your pocket: low-stakes fun where you can feel yourself getting better as you come to understand exactly what you need from your team’s lineup. I love when a game does exactly what it sets out to do, and Playball is just here to play ball.

(Released November 25, 2025, on Catalog. Copy provided by developer.)