The interface is another huge issue as it’s hard to find what you need and baseball being a number-driven sport you need to have quick access to stats and an interface that makes it easy. When sorting players the screen switches back to default after you view a particular player, so if you want to view the next player you have to scroll all the way down to find him. League leaders in homers, batting average and RBI are listed but if you want to see the leader in base hits or doubles or stolen bases there’s no way to do it and if there is the interface makes it impossible to figure out. These are basic Baseball Game Design 101 principles and Front Office Manager bungles them completely.

Sending players to the minors and calling kids back to the Bigs is also unnecessarily time consuming. You’re constantly switching back and forth to various screens to do even the simplest tasks. It just shouldn’t be this annoying to tweak your organization.

The game on the field isn’t bad (there are a heck of a lot of foul balls which tend to tire pitchers too quickly) – but even then the GUI gets in the way. You don’t have access to nearly enough info when managing a game – like opposing player ratings and stats. Sure it’s a pretty game to look at and the way the game speeds up play works fairly well (pitches are delivered in rapid succession) but it all goes back to realism for a game like this and it’s impossible to get past that hurdle.

This is a lot like the original NFL Head Coach from EA Sports – a game that showed enormous potential but it wasn’t until it received a serious redesign that it started to reach that potential. Baseball text simmers have dreamed for a game like this for years, but if you want to be taken seriously by the sim crowd you need to do a better job of simulating the sport – otherwise it’s simply not worth the time and money.

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