When five months of live baseball ends, the fun doesn’t have to. If you love baseball and like to take the excitement with you wherever you go, now you can. Baseball Kings is a fun app for the baseball lover in you that you can download onto your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. It’s a simple app that tests your ability to throw a perfect pitch, or at least one that comes close. The graphics present a 3D image of the field, making you feel you are planted front and center on the pitcher’s mound, ready to send one over home plate.
When you first download the app, you will see the main screen, which gives you three options: Play, Training and Batting. Play takes you straight to game play. Training allows players to get a feel for how the game works by letting you pitch as many balls as you like. Batting lets users play some type of batting game which did not test or refine any skills. It was more of a slot machine type of set up.
Baseball Kings keeps stats just like the professionals do. From the main screen you can get information about the app’s creators, Appnori. You can also seamlessly connect to Facebook so you share your triumphs. Sounds and data resets can also be carried out from the Set option.
To train and learn how to pitch correctly, and this is highly recommended, select the Training button. When you get there you’ll be presented with a baseball dead center, and far off in the distance will be the catcher, waiting for it. You will also see an arrow which shows you the strength of the curve that will be placed on the ball when you send it. There is also a transparent circle just in front of the catcher which serves as a target of sorts. If your pitch makes it within that circle, you are good and you collect points. Send it outside that region and start to collect strikes; and you know how that goes…three strikes and you are out!
Pitching requires a precise flick towards home plate. If you put too much of an angle on it, it won’t make it to its destination. Once done with training, head on over to game play. Here you can select from a multitude of teams to play for. After selecting your team, you are given a cheat sheet screen showing you how your ball will travel given the flick you apply. It even gives you a mini tutorial training session that I felt was a bit better than the actual practice exercise.
I have to say that I was really happy to see that the game provided the training, because even using that exercise several times, I was still not getting any good pitches in. It was very difficult for me to get that precise flick required to target the baseball in the right spot, just so that the absent batter would be able to hit it. After playing a few innings and practice rounds, you will understand exactly the type of swipe you will need to get the ball to where it needs to go. Baseball Kings is a fun app to have to get your baseball fix when you can’t get it otherwise.