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Warning to all you baseball gurus out there: The Bigs 2 is not a simulation of your favorite sport. Far from it. It's an arcade representation with crazy stunts, crunching hits at the plate, and more mini-games than should be allowed in a single videogame. Nevertheless, The Bigs 2 adds enough new features and game mechanics to make it a solid improvement over the original. The original Bigs had its Rookie Challenge and The Bigs 2 has Become A Legend mode. The premise is very similar. You create a unique player who has suffered some incredible injury during the previous year. You then start in the Mexican League and build him back up to prominence, eventually making your way back to the MLB. You'll travel around to different cities and countries, participating in everything from standard games to come-from-behind victories to myriad mini-games. As you work through Become A Legend you'll be tasked with beating a slew of Hall of Fame players with the ultimate goal of earning a spot in the Hall for yourself. The only problem with the general design of Become A Legend is that the games don't present a simple win/loss scenario to progress. Instead you'll have to meet various requirements such as completing a Legendary Catch with your created player, getting a certain number of hits, throwing out 'X' number of people, and other annoying statistical requirements. Click above to watch the Launch Trailer for The Bigs 2. The issue I have is that you have no control over where the other team hits the ball or how often they give you a pitch to hit. It's sort of blind luck and requires little to no skill. Thankfully the seriously annoying scenarios don't crop up until later down the line, but the fact that they're in at all isn't good. So while the Become A Legend mode has plenty of length, it wears out its welcome with overly annoying requirements at the tail-end. By the time you hit the end of the Become A Legend mode the gameplay has gotten tedious and frustrating enough that completing it almost doesn't seem worth it. Thankfully The Bigs 2 isn't meant to be a career-focused game that you play for 18 or 20 hours. The Bigs has always been about sitting down with a friend or against the AI and duking it out with your favorite baseball players and, in that area, the game is still able to deliver. The mini-games are really the biggest addition to the action in The Bigs. Some take place in standard games and others are different affairs altogether. I enjoy the mini-games that take place during standard play. You'll see things like the aforementioned Legendary Catch where you'll need to hit buttons in a sequence, hold a button for a certain amount of time, and balance a ball on a beam when you're leaning over a railing to make a catch on the side of the field. Those are fine and don't typically happen often enough to be an annoyance. Vote Me Please^_^ The other types of mini-games are of the off-the-field variety. There are contact, speed, glove and power mini-games to be played and they'll pop up throughout your career and can also be accessed through the main menu. The issue I have with these games is that, in your career, they're nearly the only way to improve the given statistics. What's more, a few of the games don't make much sense in the game of baseball. Whacking away at a slew of baseballs and running on top of stadiums doesn't really make much sense to me.Read full review
This game is an arcade baseball game, but it is not so ridiculous as to be the "NFL Blitz" of baseball games. However, it's no "MLB: The Show" by any stretch of the imagination. But it finds a nice balance in between the two. Yes, there are things like amazing catches and turbo, but they serve to add strategy and that "extra something" to the game rather than ruin it. This game has a lot of cool modes. The Become a Legend mode has you create a player that enters the Bigs with your team of choice. You then play other teams, along with specific challenges that can upgrade your player skills. One neat thing about playing other teams is that you can steal a teams player when you beat them. So if your team of choice has a bad second baseman, play the Red Sox and steal Dustin Pedroia. Bad catcher? Steal Joe Mauer from Minnesota. You can steal one player from each team you beat, but you can only use up to 3 stolen players in one game. This prevents your team from becoming TOO good, which lets the games still be challenging, especially at the end. There is season mode if you to take one team and play through the 162-game grind. HomeRun Pinball lets you pick any player and smash baseballs into cars, sings, windows, and everything else to rack up points. There's also the standard Play Now mode and the ability to play online. Another interesting mode is Pickup Game. If you've played NFL Street 1 or 2, you will know how this works. Basically you get to pick randomly selected players to be on your team in game. But unlike NFL Street, where you can select from a large pool of players for all positions, there are only two choices for each position. And whoever you pick, you opponent automatically gets the other player (and vice versa). Usually one is an All Star caliber player and the other is not as good (ie at left field you might get a choice between Carl Crawford and Juan Pierre). It adds an element of strategy to picking your teams and usually ensures that overall, both teams are pretty even. Overall, this game is a lot of fun. It's really perfect for someone who enjoys baseball but doesn't like the slower pace of the sims like MLB 2K. The game has a fast pace and is a blast to play with a friend, in either competitive or co-op mode. I would recommend it to arcade sports fans and baseball fans alike.Read full review
If you are a fan of arcade-style games, a la the Blitz series, this will fit right in. The Bigs 2 picks up where it's predecessor left off, providing great graphics with a humorous flair to create a very satisfying baseball simulation. For baseball purists, 2K Sports or MLB: The Show will likely be preferred. However, for those looking for a baseball game with a faster pace, while still maintaining the game's core fundamentals, the Bigs 2 is perfect. The "Become a Legend," mode is great, wherein you take a super star who is recovering from a serious injury through multiple seasons. This mode allows you to customize a baseball star, from his face to his batting stance. You begin in Mexico, in a rehabilitation league. From there, the campaign takes you through the majors, Japan, and ultimately, to Cooperstown (the baseball hall of fame). There are other modes, including home run pinball (which is a blast, literally), mini games, and simple exhibitions. All of this makes the Bigs 2 a great package .Read full review
This game was horrible at first glance. I refused to play it for the first 2 months that i had it. Eventually I got bored and decided to try it out again, after playing a few games i really started to like the controls. Also i like the fact you can have a super quick restart if you'd like to face the first batter/pitcher with different results or if you need to do something with a particular player to achieve a milestone or goal this feature can really come in handy. Although in the hall of fame games the quick restart has been disabled which is quite annoying because if you were going to need a restart the hall of fame games would be the time. The willie stargel game in particular really annoyed me. The basic gameplay setting is a 5 inning game and in this game you must take your team of prospects and shut out a team of superstars. This can be a bit misleading since the prospect team contains some of baseball histories best players but the superstars are much better especially with their pitching. It is extremely difficult to shut them out with your team for the simple fact that even if you throw a perfect pitch where they cant hit it...sometimes they do, and many times its either a home run of a double because all of these games are held in fenway and its tough to hit 1 over the monster. Otherwise I do like the back and forth ability of the big play points but sometimes it can be annoying to be up 3 to nothing in a game and have less points than your counterpart. The online play really lags although ive only played a few people. None the less it is a very fun game when you get the hang of it, home run pinball is a nice mini game. I do dislike their trading and pitcher stamina recovering mini games in the season mode. Id really like to add roy halladay to my phillies roster and the most recent downloadable roster is that of the 09 playoffs so even though cliff is still on the team it is inaccurate. I have since edited my rosters but there has been no carry over to my saved season, but no worries im 15-0 and dominating every game to this point where i just bunt to get out to get the innings over after leading games 33 to 1 or even a 49 to 0 in the 3rd.Read full review
I decided to pick this up after having played the original and was looking forward to the improvements that were supposed to have been made. While there were some notable improvements (Season mode, Batter Wheelhouse, etc) I found that the game still lacks gameplay wise in the same areas as the Bigs. Alot of the players' stats are excessively beefed up and it gets annoying when you get are constantly getting robbed of homeruns. Still, it is a fun game and is very fast paced. I did find the online play to be a little difficult to get into; there doesn't ever seem to be alot of players online. You will like this if you like a fast paced baseball game but it will be a little difficult at first if you haven't played the original.
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