Great for some quick baseball action, as long as you ignore the grind

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Coming to this game without any prior experience with the MLB 9 Innings, I was initially put off by the busy and unintuitive front-end interface in Rivals. There’s a lot going on, between daily and weekly rewards, events, game modes, training, and scouting. Most of this I’ve found it safe to ignore, at least as a beginning player, and MLB 9 Innings Rivals has been fun to pick up for some quick Major League action on the go.

If you’re coming to the game fresh like I did, the idea here is to condense pro baseball down to a couple essential elements. I’ve favored “Highlights” mode for league play, which quickly simulates games and dropped me in for key pitches and at-bats. I’ve appreciated that this works either in portrait or landscape orientation on my phone, so I’m comfortable playing either seated or standing. The game looks great, with great camera work for highlights and the batter’s box.

Unfortunately, everything around that mode—training, scouting, lineups—is packed with tedious busywork and microtransaction cruft. The aim of the game is to create an all-star lineup of S-ranked cards for your team, upgrading them by spending duplicate or lower-tier cards to improve players’ stats. I’ve ignored this as much as possible, but there’s no way to progress into more challenging tiers without engaging with it at least a bit.

It’s fine for some quick hits of MLB action, but if you dive in, just be ready for lots of tiresome card management.