Josh
International Regular
Rating: 2/5
If you’ve been drowning your sorrows over the recent Ashes series loss by watching old tapes Australia’s past cricketing glory, here comes a game that might make your time in front of the box a bit more productive. With Cricket 2005, you can replay the Ashes series so that the right team comes out on top. Again, and again, and again.
Cricket 2005 has all the polish and features that players have come to expect from an EA Sports title. All the international teams are playable and you can choose to play at 35 grounds from around the world. Pitch and weather conditions are also customisable and there enough plenty of charts, graphs, and statistics to keep even the most diehard fan happy.
With all these options it’s a shame that the game is so difficult to get into. The two most important aspects of the game – batting and bowling – both come with their own inherent problems. One nice feature of the bowling engine is the ability to throw down a special delivery, for instance a doosra or a yorker, once you fill up a meter by bowling regular deliveries at a consistently good line and length. The problem is that you never feel as though you’ve worked hard, or outthought the opposition, to get a batsman out. Getting wickets all seems to come down to pure chance.
The batting mechanics seem simple enough with players choosing to play off the front or back foot and then moving the analogue stick to select a stroke. However, it’s maddeningly difficult to score runs, even against lowly opponents, which makes games short-lived and frustrating. Once again, the ability to find gaps in the field seems to come down to chance, regardless of how well you time your stroke or whether you’ve selected the right shot to play. Adding insult to injury is the fact that run outs are far too common.
The players look lifelike enough and there is a nice fluidity to the batting animation, although the same can’t be said for the bowlers who all look awkward and gangly. The grounds lack detail to make them truly atmospheric. In the audio department, there are some satisfying cracks when you manage to blast balls all the way to, or over, the boundary. It’s a shame then that this happens all too infrequently. The doyen of cricket commentators, Richie Benaud, together with Jim Maxwell provide the commentary. Whilst there are some amusing asides, their remarks tend to be repetitive and rarely insightful.
Granted, cricket is a difficult sport to translate into a video game but we’ve seen it done successfully before with other sports that are also rather inaccessible. The sign of a good sports game is its ability to be intuitive enough for non-fans to pick up, yet pose a challenge and offer features that diehards are after. Sadly, Cricket 2005 fails on both fronts.
If you’ve been drowning your sorrows over the recent Ashes series loss by watching old tapes Australia’s past cricketing glory, here comes a game that might make your time in front of the box a bit more productive. With Cricket 2005, you can replay the Ashes series so that the right team comes out on top. Again, and again, and again.
Cricket 2005 has all the polish and features that players have come to expect from an EA Sports title. All the international teams are playable and you can choose to play at 35 grounds from around the world. Pitch and weather conditions are also customisable and there enough plenty of charts, graphs, and statistics to keep even the most diehard fan happy.
With all these options it’s a shame that the game is so difficult to get into. The two most important aspects of the game – batting and bowling – both come with their own inherent problems. One nice feature of the bowling engine is the ability to throw down a special delivery, for instance a doosra or a yorker, once you fill up a meter by bowling regular deliveries at a consistently good line and length. The problem is that you never feel as though you’ve worked hard, or outthought the opposition, to get a batsman out. Getting wickets all seems to come down to pure chance.
The batting mechanics seem simple enough with players choosing to play off the front or back foot and then moving the analogue stick to select a stroke. However, it’s maddeningly difficult to score runs, even against lowly opponents, which makes games short-lived and frustrating. Once again, the ability to find gaps in the field seems to come down to chance, regardless of how well you time your stroke or whether you’ve selected the right shot to play. Adding insult to injury is the fact that run outs are far too common.
The players look lifelike enough and there is a nice fluidity to the batting animation, although the same can’t be said for the bowlers who all look awkward and gangly. The grounds lack detail to make them truly atmospheric. In the audio department, there are some satisfying cracks when you manage to blast balls all the way to, or over, the boundary. It’s a shame then that this happens all too infrequently. The doyen of cricket commentators, Richie Benaud, together with Jim Maxwell provide the commentary. Whilst there are some amusing asides, their remarks tend to be repetitive and rarely insightful.
Granted, cricket is a difficult sport to translate into a video game but we’ve seen it done successfully before with other sports that are also rather inaccessible. The sign of a good sports game is its ability to be intuitive enough for non-fans to pick up, yet pose a challenge and offer features that diehards are after. Sadly, Cricket 2005 fails on both fronts.