The controls for batting, pitching and fielding are all pretty intuitive if you’ve played any baseball game before. The guess pitch feature is here and you use a traditional button swing (rather than using the right stick to swing, you use it to select the kind of hit you want or to pull the ball). Just in case you needed another reason to purchase a DualShock controller, the game supports it and it makes the game more enjoyable when pitching or hitting. You can use SIXAXIS controls to slide, dive and jump, but being a traditionalist, the buttons and the analog stick work best.

There were quite a few new features added to this year’s game, the biggest being by far the ability to save the game in the middle of a game. That’s right, when your wife is yelling at you to come to the dinner table when it’s the bottom of the 7th in your franchise game, you can now save it there. This feature is long overdue and very much welcomed.

Another feature is the replay vault which allows you to see every play from the game you just played, although it’s a shame that there’s no way to review highlights from game three when you’re playing game 161 or game five. Finally a lot of hoopla (on the box at least) has been made about custom soundtracks; however this is a little bait and switch – if you wanted to import Enter Sandman for Papelbon’s entrance on the Red Sox, you can’t do that…but you can hear Enter Sandman while doing your roster updates Maybe next year we’ll get that entrance music!

There is so much to like about the game – the downloadable sliders, the gameplay, the audio (foul balls never sounded so good in 5.1 audio), the weekly roster updates, the impressive amount of stats; this truly could be the successor to High Heat Baseball. There’s one problem, and it’s the same problem with last year’s game: the online is just terrible; games are full of lag if you can even create a game, and leagues cannot be formed unless you have been a registered member for two weeks. Who makes up these insane rules? If you bought The Show on release date, you cannot start a league for two weeks? Perhaps the developers knew that the online play wasn’t going to be good so by doing this pre-emptive strike, there wouldn’t be as many leagues forming and thereby there would be less bandwidth used?

If the online play gets up and running, there’s no doubt that the game should be rated an ‘A’. You could even make a case for it as a system seller for any baseball fan—MLB The Show is just that good.