Sports games tend to aim for hardcore sports fans who tune in to every contest and know its history back to front. That’s fine because the people who are interested are usually big fans, but it means that games can sometimes be impenetrable for a more casual audience. On the other end of the spectrum are more arcade-style games, which are fun and approachable for anyone, but often feel like they’re losing some authenticity in the process. MLB The Show 25 reaches for somewhere in the middle, with a game that feels both authentic and approachable.

Booting up MLB The Show 25 for the first time gives you a host of options to choose from. You can opt to go with intense, timing and positioning-based options for pitching, fielding and hitting, a few middle-ground options that focus solely on timing or positioning, or just have the game do it for you. It’s a nice set of options that lets you fine tune the experience exactly to your needs and wants, and it lets you ease in if you’re not a megafan of baseball. Everything is explained in great detail using easy-to-understand terms, so even if you haven’t tuned into a game in a decade, you can still pick it up fairly easily.

Playing a game is pretty straightforward once your settings are dialed in. You pick your team, choose whether you want to pitch or bat first, and you’re good to go. It’s simple, and it feels and looks great, too, with some slick animation work really selling the baseball experience — even if it sometimes crosses into the uncanny valley with its motion capture. You can just play individual matches, if that’s all you want to do, but it’s the game’s additional modes that are the main draw.

The biggest improvement for the 2025 edition of MLB The Show is a small overhaul to Road to the Show, effectively the game’s campaign mode. Here, instead of diving right into the league like prior years, you create a character and start off playing a couple games of high school ball, working your way through college and the Men’s College World Series, and finally finding a place among the big leagues.

There’s a surprising amount of variance in this mode, with different options for colleges and teams opening up depending on how you perform and the choices you make. You don’t have to attend college, instead signing into an MLB team straight out of high school, but playing in college leagues lets you build your profile, offering you the chance to improve your skills and land better, higher profile offers in the big leagues instead of slowly working through the minors.

It’s an incredibly robust game mode, at times let down by how low-budget it can feel. Despite ostensibly being a story mode, the actual storytelling is done cheaply, with canned animations and no voice acting. Instead, you’re forced to sit through stilted cutscenes where two characters flap their lips at each other while text boxes pop up on the screen. Occasionally, you’ll be able to pick from a few different responses during a conversation, but it doesn’t seem like these affect how the story plays out in the slightest. It’s a bit of a bummer, and it would be nice to see this fleshed out a bit in the future, but it’s still a big improvement overall compared to prior years.

Other familiar game modes return too, including Franchise mode, which has a few small changes to how you pick up free agents, and Storylines, which is a little bit light on content at the moment but is wonderfully presented. If you’re not a big baseball history buff, some of Storylines will be lost on you, but it’s a lovely walk through some historical, real-life player stories, with more on the way in future updates.

The final major addition is Diamond Quest, part of the Diamond Dynasty game mode, which is something a lot of players are likely to get sucked into. It’s effectively a roguelike game mode that’s presented like a board game, with players rolling a die to progress through the board. Landing on a square either gives you a reward, does nothing, or lets you partake in a gameplay challenge — like scoring a specific amount of runs or striking out a specific amount of players — which gives you rewards like cards. When you reach the end of the board, you play in a game, and if you win, you get to keep everything you earned on the board. If you lose, it’s all lost. It’s an absolute blast, and it’s a great addition to the game that lets you grind out cards and other rewards without it feeling monotonous.

MLB The Show 25 offers a host of small, but meaningful, upgrades to the MLB The Show experience, making it the best game in the series to date. It feels a little bit underbaked in some places, but its new additions to Road to the Show and Diamond Dynasty make it well worth picking up for newcomers and veterans alike.