MLB The Show 24 review: A love letter to the sport of baseball

MLB The Show 24 is an excellent sports sim that takes you on a journey through two iconic eras of baseball history. It also proves it’s possible to create a card-collecting mode that doesn’t force you to spend money on microtransactions, which is the icing on the cake.

San Diego Studios delivered an impressive slate of new content in MLB The Show 24. For the first time in series history, Road to the Show fans can create a woman and follow their journey to Major League Baseball. On top of this, Storylines celebrates a new batch of Negro League legends and looks back at the illustrious career of Yankees legend Derek Jeter. While Diamond Dynasty has received a whole host of community-requested quality-of-life changes. Most additions push the series in a positive direction, but a few questionable design choices missed the mark.

Stories worth telling 

Starting with MLB The Show 23, San Diego Studio partnered with the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and its president, Bob Kendrick, to celebrate the only professional baseball league for Black players until Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947. In the Storylines game mode, Kendrick narrated short videos about eight Negro League players and their remarkable accomplishments, then players recreated them on the field. The Negro League Storylines was my favorite game mode in MLB The Show 23, and Kendrick has returned in MLB The Show 24 with four new legends. 

Season 2 of Negro Leagues Storylines in MLB The Show 24 is an absolute treat. You learn about the Thunder Twins, Buck Leonard, and Josh Gibson, as well as the first woman to play professional baseball, Toni Stone, and one of the best players in baseball history, Henry Aaron. It’s impossible not to be inspired by these famous figures, and their charisma oozes through the screen. All credit goes to Kendrick’s masterful orating skills and San Diego Studio for crafting a gameplay experience with authentic sounds, commentary, gameplay, and visuals. I was left craving more, and fortunately, the game mode will get more stories in a future update. 

RE2PECT The Captain

As a born and raised Red Sox fan, it pained me to load up the Derek Jeter Storyline mode. The last thing I wanted to do was learn more about my least favorite team. But the inner baseball fan inside me couldn’t help but appreciate the mode for brilliantly retelling one of the most dominant runs in sports history when the “core four” won four World Series trophies in four out of five seasons. San Diego Studio has knocked it out of the park with the Derek Jeter interviews and nailed it with the subway-themed menus, authentic commentary package, and fun gameplay moments that made it enjoyable to recreate history. I’m endlessly excited that more content will be added to the game mode in a future update. 

A true play-to-win experience

Gameplay improvements, like improving outfield defense to make it easier to throw out runners, making pinpoint pitching more difficult by flipping the commands for left-handed pitchers, and an unannounced buff making exit velocity contribute to less unforgiving hitting, go a long way to flesh out Diamond Dynasty. 

Additionally, the devs listened to community feedback by removing 99 cards on launch day. Instead, MLB The Show 24 favors a power creep system, meaning players can gradually earn better cards, creating a better overall experience that doesn’t get stale as fast. 

But in my opinion, the biggest appeal of Diamond Dynasty is that, every year, San Diego Studio makes it possible to get the best cards without ever needing to spend a dime. If you spend enough time in all the offline and online modes, you’ll eventually acquire the game mode’s most valuable cards because programs and collections make the process easier. 

Every feature can’t be a grand slam 

In stark contrast to all the great aspects of MLB The Show 24, Road to the Show (RTTS) and Franchise mode disappointed me. The standout additions to RTTS are the options to create a woman baseball player and MLB Draft Combine. If you create a woman, a new dedicated storyline follows two characters as they become the first female players in Major League Baseball. I enjoyed the MLB Network studio cutscenes, which added some depth to the mode, but all the other cutscenes use voice-acted text messages, which feels lazy and dated. Meanwhile, Draft Combine only consists of a few simple drills and games that aren’t very exciting. 

Shifting the focus over to Franchise, years of playing Franchise modes in NHL, Madden, FIFA, NBA 2K, and Football Manager have made me appreciate the thrill of pulling the strings and leading your favorite team to a championship. But I feel none of that joy while playing MLB The Show 24’s Franchise mode. The devs neglected a passionate community by failing to make any noteworthy additions. The combination of a clunky UI that makes it impossible to find anything, a barebones scouting system, and a disappointing presentation set the game mode years back from the rest of the competition. But my grievances with Road to the Show and Franchise aren’t enough to detract from an otherwise brilliant installment in a series I’ve truly grown to appreciate over the past few years. MLB The Show 24 is a project made by and for community members, expertly curated by the team at San Diego Studio that has found its stride and, in my opinion, set a new gold standard for sports simulation games.