Power Pros Touch Review: The Boys of Summer

Since it’s debut in the summer of 2008, the iTunes AppStore has become the de facto home for a number of genres that had previously struggled to make the jump to portable gaming.  But while tower defense and match-3 puzzle games have spent the better part of a year cementing their place in the hearts of iPhone users everywhere, the last few months have seen another genre step up to the plate.  For many an iPhone gamer, the summer of 2009 will be remembered as the summer of baseball.

Power Pros Touch isn’t the first baseball game to make its way to the AppStore.  In fact, with more than a dozen baseball titles currently available for purchase some might say that Power Pros is a little late to the game.  But as the old saying goes, sometimes the best things in life are worth waiting for.

Whether this is your first time stepping up to the virtual plate or your fifty-first, Power Pros Touch offers the perfect blend of exciting baseball action and accessible gameplay.  Like many baseball games, Power Pros Touch is largely about pitching and hitting.  Making excellent use of the touch screen, you’ll choose your pitch from a selection wheel and pinpoint exactly where in the batter’s box you want to throw it.  When the shoe is on the other foot and you’re stepping up to the plate, a small target will appear that you’ll need to tap at just the right time to connect with the ball.  Little touches, like sliding your finger upward to try for a power hit, round out the core experience.

The visuals in Power Pro are so sugary sweet that those judging by appearances alone would almost instantly assume this is a children’s games.  The characters, with their rounded heads and giant eyes, feel like vinyl dolls come to life.  Power Pros Touch is simply the latest handheld iteration of Japan’s wildly successful Pawapuro series, so the teams and uniforms will be unfamiliar to most.  While entirely fictional (as opposed to having roots in real world Japanese baseball), teams like the Dolphins and the Pawapuro All-Stars have long been a staple of Japanese sports gaming.

What strikes me as odd about this release though is the lack of a Major League Baseball license.  Konami had previously brought the Pawapuro series to North American gamers as MLB Power Pros for the Nintendo Wii and Sony Playstation 2, featuring all of the teams and players in the MLB.  While I can understand their desire to keep the roster small for the iPhone version, it’s surprising that they didn’t pick six teams from North America in an effort to appeal to a wider audience.  Still, wide eyes trump a wide audience any day, and Power Pros Touch definitely has wide, adorable eyes.

Despite it’s cute as a button presentation, an amazing amount of depth is available for players that want to amp up the challenge.  Much like its console predecessors Power Pros Touch can be customized to offer as simple or as deep an experience as you like.  By default the game boots up on the easiest settings, but a little tweaking in the options can change a number of items from automatic from manual.  The default controls automate everything outside of the pitching and batting, which means that base running and fielding are all controlled by your AI teammates.  And while the simplicity of this is downright elegant, gamers who want to step outside of the batters box and get live in the field can do so with ease thanks to the level of customization offered.  Full season and exhibition modes are also offered with adjustable numbers of innings, rules, and difficulties all popping up at the front of every game.

The team at Konami have done the seemingly impossible: they’ve created a baseball game for everyone.  Not only that, but they’ve created it to be played anywhere and for any length of time.  You can play a quick one inning match while waiting for your cab just as easily as you can work your way through a full season over a few months of lunch breaks.  There’s no doubt about it, Konami have really hit this one out of the park.  At $3.99 Power Pros Touch may be the best value you’ll find on the iPhone this summer.  You can find it exclusively in the iTunes App Store.

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