If you know anything about Baseball, you’re in luck. MLB Manager 18 has no tips, no tutorials, no hints at the rules of the sport or the nuances within the stats. Whereas so many management sims allow a little wiggle room for new players who may only take a partial interest in the sport, this game effectively shutters itself off from any kind of enquiry. In fact, even those who have an extensive knowledge of the American pastime might find themselves completely lost among a hundred menus which offer no solace or guiding nudges about what specific command does what action. It’s a mess.

MLB18 opens with the usual fare of naming your coach, selecting the team you’d like to head up from the American or National leagues. Before even seeing a playing field or batting cage, the game prompts ask whether to simulate the real world of Baseball. Maybe you’d like to tick boxes which really mean very little until the game gets into the flow of things? MLB18 has you covered by asking about pitchers and batters with no shade of why they’re asking.

Once these frustrating opening screens have passed by, we’re met with the most uninspiring handful of menus. Still, there’s no sign of any tutorial so absently tapping at certain boxes in the hope of either starting a season or changing the line-up of the team relies solely on either luck or parsing the information until you stumble into the correct menu option and there’s a list of names that mean very little. Do we tap and hold? Do we tap? Can we rename anybody to make the game more personal? Mess around and find out, because the developer clearly doesn’t want to tell us.

I chose to use the Philadelphia Phillies, for myriad reasons and wanted to dive straight into a game, hoping to have some sway on how my team performs. I entered a game, forgiving the lack of direction thus far and tapped ‘Swing’. My hopes of any kind of interesting interaction were thwarted as I watched a wall of text fall down the screen in a pseudo commentary voice. The pitch of the ball was described as arcing through the air, my batter did his thing and we made it to first base. The static Baseball diamond on my screen changed the colours of a few names to state that the Phillies had grabbed the first base and the game prompted me, asking if I wanted to steal second base.

Why not? Maybe there’s a mini game hidden away that allows me to test the infield players as I heroically dash from first base to second as the pitcher unleashes his ball. Nope. More text, we didn’t steal the base and my batter struck out. Before I even considered trying to swap out players, I decided to simulate a couple of innings, in the hope that maybe the game would show some form of animation of players movements, balls flying out to home runs or sliding into home. Sadly, a few names blinked red rather than black and the menu appeared from before, only now I was 0-3.

Of course, most management games are brimming with menus and stats. That’s mostly why we flock to them, because it’s in the minutiae where we find joy. It seems no matter where I turned, every menu is bland, leading into another soulless list where drop down menus languish, unexplained or even brushed over by the game itself. I know a decent amount about Baseball, I like to watch a bit of Spring training, I catch games where I can, and I stumbled around lists that made no sense to me. Despite knowledge, a game needs some form of guidance. Building a routine of which option furthers play or the calendar, maybe highlights a few of the star players to add into the starting line-up. If I wanted to roam endless boxes of information I don’t really understand, I’d open Microsoft Excel.

I can’t imagine that even the most expert Baseball fan will find much joy here. There’s no option to swing a bat, or throw a pitch, which could have easily been implemented. MLB18 takes everything that makes Baseball an interesting sport and removes it. There’s no passion for the game, or even any hint that there’s a genuinely fun sport within the simulator.

After a time I started changing the strategy of my team – increasing their aggression on running bases, telling my pitcher how to hold base runners, I asked my players to steal bases wherever they could. I found a screen that told me that my personality was “charitable” and that I was “delighted” with the performance of the team. I started rotating players around, choosing different starting pitchers. Not one thing made any noticeable difference. I might as well have just simulated every game using the default settings, because nothing I changed really mattered. The game rolled some imaginary dice or randomly generated a few numbers, translated that into ‘boy howdy’ Baseball commentary and declared my batter swung and missed. STRIKE!

I’d like to say that MLB Manager 18 has a redeeming feature, but it doesn’t. It’s the most lifeless, boring game I’ve played in a long time. Maybe someone who reads every little detail about the sport will find something to love. You have to be an absolute die-hard fan of Baseball and have the patience of a saint to really get anything from MLB18. As someone who supports a team, watches games, plays other Baseball games on mobile and console I wanted to still be guided around and told about the intricacies of this management sim. Instead, I felt like I was scooped up from Little League practice and told to bat in the World Series.

Space jockeys and planetary pioneers alike are rejoicing with this week’s release of Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky for Xbox One. No Man’s Sky is a sci-fi adventure set in an absolutely massive universe, in which every star is orbited by planets filled with life, each of which you can visit if you’d like. Every player’s experience is unique thanks to the game’s procedural generation, ensuring you’ll discover lifeforms and environments that no other player has seen before. Thanks to a number of big additions to the base game, the release of No Man’s Sky on Xbox One brings with it some great features and opportunities to get excited about.

The NEXT Update is the Best Update

In addition to the core No Man’s Sky experience, Xbox One owners get the benefit of the game launching alongside its highly-anticipated NEXT update. The NEXT update brings a bevy of changes to the game, including (but not limited to) greatly improved graphics and textures, a new third-person perspective available both on-foot and in spaceships, an overhauled base building system that will let you build multiple bases on any planet, and the ability to command a fleet of freighters, which you can send out on exploratory missions.

Everything’s Better with Friends

The biggest change to the game with the NEXT update is the new multiplayer feature, which allows you to play with up to three of your friends in the same universe. There’s plenty to do with your space chums, including racing exocraft across the surface of newfound planets, cooperatively engaging in space battles against other players, and dividing labor when constructing colonies of bases. There are even standalone multiplayer missions that can be completed together. Of course, there’s a bit of a double-edged laser sword to all of this: you might run into a group of people working together to loot and pillage your base or take out your ship. Finally, you should note that friendly fire is on by default, so your multi-tool’s laser will damage your pals if they accidentally get in your line of fire (or deserve to be double-crossed).

Mix It Up with Mixplay

Not only can you now play No Man’s Sky with friends thanks to its new multiplayer mode, you can also have some fun by letting your friends and/or total strangers get in on the action by streaming on Mixer. No Man’s Sky Mixplay feature allows anyone watching your stream to spend their hard-earned Spark on everything from launch fuel to A-Class Tech, making it a bit easier to progress and explore more of your universe faster. Of course, if they’re feeling less-than-charitable, they could also spend their Spark on warping in enemy Sentinels or pirates to ratchet up the tension and make it more likely that’ll you be just another corpse floating through the void.

The Deep Beauty of Deep Space

No Man’s Sky is a beautiful game, featuring nearly infinite colorful worlds and creatures. It’s even more gorgeous on Xbox One X, running at 4K Ultra HD if you’ve got a monitor or television that supports it. Best of all, you can play it the way you want it. No Man’s Sky on Xbox One X feature two different modes that you can toggle between in the game options menu:  a “High Performance” mode which runs at 1440p and 60 frames per second, and a “High Quality” option which achieves a native 4K resolution (or 2160p). When combined with the new and improved flora, fauna, and environments, these visual options make this a true stunner.

Play it Your Way

One of the best features of No Man’s Sky is the fact that, once you’re through the initial mission tasking you with repairing your ship and multi-tool, you can largely play the game in whatever manner you’d like. If you want to spend the majority of your time in space, go right ahead. Feel like bouncing from planet to planet without mucking around with bases? Go nuts. In addition to customize your play style, the NEXT update also added a brand-new character customization feature that offers a huge range of options. Not only can you choose between each of the game’s five races, you can also tweak everything from your gloves and armor to your torso and head.

We’ve only begun scratching the surface of No Man’s Sky for Xbox One, but it’s clear that this is the definitive version of an already deep game. We can’t wait to find out what the team at Hello Games will bring us next.

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