Baseball Riot is a humorous physics-based puzzle game by 10tons, and the sequel of Tennis in the Face that was released on Steam, Android and iOS.
In Baseball Riot, you take the role of Gabe Carpaccio; a former baseball star that started selling baseball equipment after he was forced to retire through injury. At the same time, his former team gets acquired and sponsored by an energy drink company called Explodz Inc.
Whoever drinks this energy drink becomes addicted and starts behaving violently; something Gabe just won’t stand for, so he decides to take this evil company down. To do this, he has to travel across the United States and find proof to expose this drink as the poison that it is.
The game is divided into 8 fictional regions, with a total on 13 levels each, except one that only has 12. This grants you a total of 103 levels, where your objective is to clear each of them by knocking out obnoxious fans, leery catchers, biased umpires and more.
The mechanics of the game are pretty simple and easy to pick up. You just need to aim your shot and swing the bat to send the ball bouncing around the level to hit multiple enemies. The controls are very minimalistic, with the only inputs needed being the left stick to aim, the A button to swing and the Y button to reset the level in case you miss your shot.
To complete each level you only need to clear out the enemies, but to fully progress you will need to collect the stars that are present in each one. Much like a lot of mobile games, each level offers 3 stars, with bonus golden balls if you maximise your efficiency.
In each region there are also 2 extra objectives to fulfil, although they aren’t necessary to complete the game unless you are an achievement hunter. These can be viewed in the game by going into the pitch symbol on each region and checking the details for each one.
Once you managed to clear all the levels and get access to the final stadium, you will be facing the 3 bosses of the game. Only here does the game get tricky, testing everything you’ve learned up to this point. I will not spoil the fun by revealing exactly what that means, but the boss battles do deserve to be discussed.
To defeat each of the bosses, you will have to reduce their life to 0, but without directly hitting them with balls. Instead, you have to defeat the other enemies in the level, but with 2 small problems. Firstly, instead of 3 balls, you only have 2. Secondly, you need to catch stars in order to drain life from each boss. For each star that you catch, you reduce the life of each boss by 1 point. It’s relatively standard practice to mix up boss battles, but they do a nice job here.
Summary
If you are looking for a game that is both simple to play and can provide some hours of fun, this is a good one to look at. You’ll probably stress yourself out if you want to complete every single level with 3 stars and get all the achievements, but it’s satisfying to do so and something I recommend. My only complaint would be that it feels like a mobile phone title and doesn’t really do anything special to make it stand out on consoles.
João is a games journalist, Senior Editor at XDA Developers. They contributed 156 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: previously reported for Neowin before joining XDA Developers in 2021, where he leads coverage of Windows, Microsoft, and hardware.