Imagineer’s released many games over the years, from Japanese versions of Doom and Populous to original efforts like the Fitness Boxing series and Quest 64 (yes, really). In 2024, they released Dice Project: Cats Baseball, which streamlines baseball into a dice rolling game that anyone can play. It’s a novel concept, but the execution here leaves plenty to be desired.
There’s a desolate island called Cat Town where the people endlessly fight and steal, ruled over by powerful Kings who control its districts. A young man named Sechs becomes tired of this life, and sets out to defeat the Kings and become the ruler of Cat Town. He wants a world of peace, but what if he learns about Cat Town’s secrets…
Your goal in each game of baseball is to get your players around the field more times than your opponent. You do this by rolling dice, which is determined by choosing one of four options. The dice only affect whoever’s currently batting, either landing on good moves that move you around the field or bad moves that penalize you with a strike. Get three strikes and you swap over for the next half of the inning, of which there are three per game (though you can increase this in Versus mode).
Dice rolls operate on a rock-paper-scissors system, where you and your opponent’s choices affect whether you’ll land on a good or bad move. If you both pick the same die, that gives an advantage to the batter where it’s more likely to land on a special spot like “Great Play”, which lets them re-roll their opponent’s move, or a “Home Run” to move everyone on field to the end and get a point. You can also use the limited MAKYU option to instantly give the batter a die full of bad moves, unless they counter with their own MAKYU.
It sounds complicated but is straightforward in action, and there’s a decent bit of strategizing as you try to anticipate and counter your opponent’s moves. But between the random dice rolls and your choices amounting to guesswork, there’s too much left up to chance. A match can go entirely in you or your opponent’s favour, or change suddenly without much reason. You’re just throwing dice until you win or lose, unable to significantly affect the outcome.
You can unlock more characters by playing through the game’s three modes: Story, Versus, and an unlockable tournament-style League mode. However, the characters don’t have unique abilities, so every match ends up being the same matter of attrition. It doesn’t help that they take a while to play through, accompanied by an endlessly looping bit of electronica.
The presentation’s otherwise solid with its cute chibi cat characters and bold attractive UI. The story has a decent bit of dialogue and plot going on, lending stakes to each fight despite how repetitive they become. Cats Baseball isn’t bad, but the extensive randomness makes things tedious, and hopefully Imagineer can improve on that in future “Dice Project” titles.
