Cricket 07

Review - The unmistakable click of finger on D-pad....

Not only are we slap bang in the middle of the Christmas buying season but England have just embarked (woefully as it turns out) on their first defence of The Ashes causing the country to awaken the embers of the cricketing fires that were lit in the summer of 2005 when our boys finally broke the Aussie hoodoo and retained the sacred urn after so many years of failure (it also saw Andrew Flintoff memorably manage to remain drunk for about a week across all the national media which was almost as entertaining). It sounds like the perfect time to release a cricket game and who should step up to the wicket but EA with Cricket 2007.

Cricket is one of those love it or hate it sports, there's no getting away from the fact that even in it's shortened Twenty20 form half the time one team is stood around in the field, where unless you're bowling your involvement is sporadic at best, and the other half you're sat watching from the stands waiting for your chance to go out and bat. But there is a depth and beauty to be found in the game too, the battle of wills between bowler and batsman, the tactics involved in field placing and the sheer release of driving a ball perfectly through the covers for four.

Needless to say translating such a complex and inevitably slow sport into an entertaining video game has proved something of a problem for developers over the years. Much like rugby, cricket games have never really found a way of recreating the sport accurately while at the same time making it fun to play in the way for example football, tennis and basketball games have, meaning that their interest to the non-cricketing enthusiast has remained severely limited. In this sense Cricket 2007, for all its improvements, still fails to create a game that will appeal outside of its narrow target audience, so if you're not a fan of the sport then you can safely assume that you'll not get much enjoyment out of the game.

For cricket fans however, Cricket 2007 offers a multitude of game modes from the quick play ten over games through the Twenty20 Cup, County Championship, NatWest Pro40 and C&G Trophy all the way up to full test matches and international tours. Cricket 2007 also includes an official Ashes mode which lets you play through both the current series as well as England's victorious 2005 one. There is even the full range of domestic Australian competitions to play through as well should you grow bored of the English weather. It's questionable just how many people will be wanting to play though a full five day test match, let alone a whole series, but it's nice to have the option all the same and the inclusion of Twenty20 games is a blessing as it's potent mix of big hitting and high drama is surely the style of cricket best suited to a computer game.

Once out on the field itself the mechanics of bowling are well handled and easy to get to grips with, you pick the type of delivery and then during the bowlers run up decide where the ball should bounce before finally deciding the pace of the ball by stopping a power meter before it reaches the top. It's to the game's credit that such a complex skill is recreated with such ease. However, a lot of the tactics and strategy in cricket takes place in the mind as the batsman and bowler battle to out manoeuvre each other and try to anticipate what the next delivery will do. This side of the sport is never going to replicate well in a game as the computer controlled opposition lack any individual personality or moods. In real life if you throw a few slower paced balls down the pitch to tempt the batsman into playing some attacking shots you can then attempt to surprise him with a high speed out swinger hoping he'll play a similar shot again and nick the ball to the slips, even if the tactic failed to result in a wicket you'd get a sense of his reaction, he may become more wary of your next deliveries or go for broke and teach you a lesson by knocking the next ball for six. But in the game you never get the sense that such tactical thought makes any difference and you cant help feeling that the AI treats each successive delivery as a whole new event not linked in any way to what came previously which is a shame and the game loses something by not being able to recreate the sense of a personal battle of wills. What's left is a bowling experience that feels a little soulless and random despite its well thought out implementation. The other problem with bowling is that doing it well often doesn't give you much reward in a traditional gaming sense. Scoring a goal or killing a room full of enemies in other games produces a jolt of satisfaction and encourages you to carry on, how interesting or satisfying it feels to bowl over after over of dot ball maidens is open to debate even though in cricketing terms it would be classed as a good spell.

Batting is where the real fun is to be had, the new all singing all dancing 'Century Stick' control method feels instantly natural to anyone with even a basic knowledge of the shot selections and isn't complicated to work out for those who don't. Basically, the left analogue stick positions the batsman and determines if he approaches the shot off the front or back foot while the right analogue stick is pushed in the direction you're aiming to hit the ball. Timing is the key to hitting your desired shot and the correct timing gets noticeably harder as you get to the lower order batsmen, which is a nice touch. The opposition AI does a good job of moving the field around to try and compensate for your most common shots so you can never just rely on the same few shots to rack up big scores. At the end of the day most people casually playing a cricket game just want to get out there and bat and its easy to see why, there is a real sense of satisfaction to be had in pulling off good shots and there is a decent amount of pride involved in getting a big score that makes losing a wicket a real annoyance.

This being an EA game you expect big things from the presentation, and while it is by no means bad it's clear that the Cricket series is very much a second tier EA game with a distinct lack of gloss evident, it appears cricket games don't warrant an intro for a start! All the expected licenses are present and correct however, with real player names etc., even if their in game models often bare only a passing resemblance to the real thing. The rest of the in game graphics do the job and the player animations are nice but Cricket 2007 is by no means on a par with the level of detail and style present in the most recent FIFA and NHL titles.

The problems with Cricket 2007 are more with how the sport translates to the video game format than with the game itself which does a decent job of recreating the intricacies of cricket and as such giving the game a score is a very personal thing. Cricket fans will find a lot to enjoy here and will understandably forgive the areas of the game where virtual cricket fails to live up to the real thing, but the rest of the world should pass on by as a computer game will never convert you to a sport like cricket however well it's implemented.

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