MLB The Show 25 Review

I don’t envy the work it takes to keep an annual series like MLB The Show going. There’s so much to do and perilously little time to do it in, whether that’s adding new features, fixing the things people didn’t like, or writing and producing an entire new season of The Negro Leagues. It’s especially hard when all that time and effort often gets distilled down to a single question: is it worth upgrading from last year? Thanks in large part to fundamental changes to the way the Road To The Show and Diamond Dynasty modes work, MLB The Show 25 answers that question with a resounding yes.

The actual Baseball hasn’t changed a lot this year, which I don’t mind, but there are some nice tweaks throughout. For starters, recent changes like two-way players, adjustments to shift rules, and the pitch clock are all fully incorporated at this point. There are some new quick time events that can happen when you are locked into controlling a single player, rather than the whole team, the most notable of which is the new swim move to avoid tags. I was a little nervous that it would make stealing bases too easy, but the prompt only seems to come up occasionally, and is rare enough to feel more like a treat than a clutch. Infielders now have a few different initial reactions that can have a big impact on how quickly they get to a ball, too. This mostly means that poor defenders play more like it now, so the net effect is worse defense, but I think it’s a worthwhile tradeoff that makes great defenders more valuable, particularly in Franchise mode.

There’s also a new ambush hitting feature where you can “cheat” towards inside or outside pitches, making it easier to hit on the side you choose and harder on the side you don’t. I like it in theory, though I’ve ultimately had more success staying neutral, and so I only rarely use it. Hitting overall still feels great, though something seems off about perfect contact. You still get the same satisfying crack of the bat, but it feels like the vast, vast majority of the time it results in a hard hit out or just a single, which is way too little payoff for what should be the best possible hits. Hopefully that gets adjusted over time.

Franchise, where you get to take control of your favorite team and right the wrongs of ownership (like adding a badly needed impact bat to my beloved Mariners), is pretty similar to last year. The custom game entry, which lets you auto-simulate games until high-leverage situations come up and you opt into taking control, remains one of my favorite features. The way you offer free agent contracts has been overhauled this year: You now prioritize a small selection of targets, and you accumulate interest from them as days pass. It does a great job simplifying the free agent process, and I like the strategy around deciding between joining the pursuit of marquee free agents vs rounding out my roster.

All that is to say the core of The Show 25 remains as solid as ever, focusing on some small but appreciated updates over sweeping overhauls. And while they may not have fundamentally changed, Franchise and March to October both take advantage of new production elements, like player vs player comparisons. The new G.O.A.T. difficulty is as hard as it sounds, too, with fast pitches, aggressive breaks on balls, and a very small Plate Coverage Indicator. I will freely admit it’s much too hard for me, though I expect people who crave punishing challenges will enjoy this one.

Road to the Show

Road To The Show, where you take control of your own custom ballplayer as they lead up to and then eventually enter the Major League, is where you’ll find some of the larger changes year-over-year – and they do a fantastic job of reinvigorating the mode. Unlike previous years, where you participate in the combine before being drafted into the league, now you begin as an amateur all the way back in high school. It’s brief, but playing out the end of senior year and trying to impress scouts and recruiters while you chase a championship is a fun twist. Pinky Rogers, my two-way pitcher and first baseman, dominated the competition and found himself firmly in the crosshairs of two dozen big league clubs and, in another new addition to The Show, college scouts.

This led to a legitimately interesting choice: do I jump straight into pro ball and start working my way up, or do I go to college, time-skip to the end of senior year, and try to become a highly polished, highly drafted blue chip prospect? I opted for the student-athlete route, and accepted the offer to play for TCU, one of the eight real college teams to choose from. The authenticity was impressive, from recreations of each team's home and away jerseys as I played through the college baseball playoffs to the distinct TINK as metal bats made contact with the ball. Choosing that route meant I arrived at the Minor Leagues with higher stats and could make the jump from AA to AAA much, much faster than in previous years, which is a big improvement from what has historically been a bit of a slog.

The other big change is to how players are upgraded. Previous iterations of The Show had a “use it to improve it” model, sort of like in an Elder Scrolls RPG, where success with specific actions, like hitting against left handed pitchers or throwing strikes with specific pitches, slowly raised those particular attributes. That’s now replaced by a token system, where you get points to allocate. It might sound like a subtle difference, but it massively changes how you develop as a player. Every good at bat, pitch, play in the field, or training session accumulates progress, which makes the pull of playing “just one more game” very difficult to resist. It’s a little tough to justify doing some of the longer or tougher training minigames, like the Inter-Squad game, when you can just as easily make progress doing simple ladder drills, but it’s a worthwhile tradeoff that has made Road To The Show hard for me to put down.

Storyline

One of the marquee features of The Show is the Negro League storyline, which returns for its third season. It remains one of the most impressive modes in any sports game, combining a mini documentary featurette about Negro League stars like “Cool Papa” Bell or Caleb “Turkey” Stearns with playable moments from their careers. It’s once again anchored with stories from Bob Kendrick, the magnetic president of the Negro League museum, and continues to stand out as an excellent overlap of history and gameplay.

That said, new stories aside, this mode is functionality identical to the previous two iterations, which puts it in a bit of an odd place. I praised the debut of the Negro League in my MLB The Show 23 review, but the lack of advancement over the last few years is disappointing. It’s still a mix of excellent vignettes and basic gameplay challenges (separated by long loading times), but the challenges themselves are often just to get some hits or strike a few people out, which is the same as the gameplay moments from Diamond Dynasty. I know they can do more unique and interesting things, like when your entire defense sat around you when you pitched as Satchel Paige in The Negro League season 1, and the fact that they don’t do that a lot more feels like a missed opportunity to make the gameplay side of this mode stand out.

The other piece that sticks out is the notable absence of an expansive storyline focused on an individual player like we had with Derek Jeter in The Show 24. That extensive look into The Captain wasn’t perfect, but the branching paths and rewards seemed like the next evolution of the Storylines model. It felt like we were just scratching the surface of what Storylines could be, especially when there is no shortage of incredible stories from the last century of baseball history, so The Show 25 not running with that momentum is a tough pill to swallow.

Diamond Dynasty

Diamond Dynasty, the live service corner of The Show where you gather players via card collecting to form your baseball team, is back with a few excellent changes of its own. First, Sets and Seasons, where cards were only usable during a specific timeframe before being retired in most modes, is officially over, and I am so glad for that. Some great cards are rewarded for grinding through multi-faceted programs, and it never seemed worth putting in the work for players that were going to be forced to the bench eventually. Now if you go through the effort to get the top tier Roger Clemens card from his program, for example, you get to keep it, earn XP to upgrade it, and let your favorites be cornerstones of your team. It’s a very, very good change.

The other big update is the inclusion of a new single-player mode called Diamond Quest, which is sort of like a roguelite-inspired board game. It sounds strange, but it’s honestly a pretty fun way to play. You roll a die each turn, and every space you cross can hide a gameplay challenge, a reward of some kind, or nothing at all. The objective is to get to the Stadium (or Stadiums), and win a three-inning game there with your squad. If you win, you get to keep the rewards you accumulated and get a chance at a high level card dropping. It’s fun, very replayable since the contents of the tiles are randomized, and pretty generous with its rewards. I particularly appreciate that you get to choose your difficulty for the Stadium games. Sometimes it’s nice to just take the easy win, while other times it’s worth the risk of losing what you picked up by aiming for a harder challenge, since that increases your odds of getting the best drops at the end.