EA Sports Cricket 07 Review

BY Mufaddal Fakhruddin | POSTED: 28 November 2006

Sunil Gavaskar recently said, “Cricket is a boring game to watch”. Very true, but Cricket 2007 makes it a boring game to play too.



EA Sports don’t learn from their mistakes, do they? Their Cricket ’97 was an exceptional game, for that time it had great graphics and good commentary with plenty of variations in batting shots and bowling options. After Cricket 2002 they lost their way completely. Every churn out improved very little from the previous editions and it was basically the same. Cricket 2007 is no exception. The game has improved very little from its 2005 counterpart. It is still dull, the commentary is terrible, lack of shots and the same boring gameplay. But this time around they have also managed to screw up player names. The new addition to this edition is the Ashes Tour, concept of which is good but if the gameplay is bad then what can you do in a sports game?

The interface has changed; this time around providing some decent menu screen music too. But the menu is still jumbled up, especially the options menu. And why does the game load on 640 resolution and then change itself when it loads a user profile? This manages to screw up my icon placement on my desktop. It is irritating to re- arrange around 15 icons on my desktop almost all the time.

In the menu, you will find the usual one on one matches, world series, tours, knockout tournaments etc. And of course the highlight of this game, the Ashes Tour. You can either play the 2005 Ashes series or the 2006/07 series. You can also re-live some of the 2005 Ashes moments by playing real life scenarios from the tour, much like the ‘classics’ section from Codemaster’s Brian Lara cricket game series. EA has also introduced Twenty20 matches. That’s about all the variation the game has to offer in terms of content.

I am the King of ODI!!

Now about the crappy gameplay. Sunil Gavaskar recently said, “Cricket is a boring game to watch”. Very true, but EA Sports makes cricket a boring game to play too. The three main aspects of cricket- batting, bowling and fielding is so dull and uninspired to play with that you wonder if the Stick Cricket flash game is more fun than this. Look at the attached screenshot with this paragraph. Just a simple glance on the scorecard tells you how the game has failed. I managed to score 944 runs in an ODI game. I scored 535 runs with Virender Shewag (if you pay attention you will notice the player names are screwed up). I managed to pile up 6 sixes in an over. Heck, I have managed to break almost all the major ODI records here (playing on full difficulty)!! How was I able to do it? There is an exploit in the batting system that allows you to score such unimaginable runs (It doesn’t matter if I scored these runs against Bangladesh, it’s as easy with the Aussies too). For your sake, I will not disclose what it is. This exploit is present from Cricket ’97. If I remember correctly, I scored 1500+ runs in a day in a Test match.

The major chunk of runs came from straight sixes and a chance of fours. Not because I don’t love to play ground shots, but because I could not manage to get past the fielders! No matter how sweetly I timed the shot, the ball would always go to the fielder. I was forced to use the loft button to get in some runs. This is absolutely crazy, it was frustrating to watch my well timed shots just merely roll over to the fielders. The Advance shot button (which makes the batsmen come forward) is an absolute waste. It was really hard to time a shot properly. Even the addition of a timing gauge, which helps the player to time his shots properly, doesn’t do much good too.
There are no new batting shots to play with; you just have the regular looking cover drive, hook, pull, sweeps, etc. The shots don’t change according to the ball which makes it robotic. I am sure there are many different styles of cover drives or straight drives!

CONTINUED ON PAGE 2 »

PREVIOUS   [1]   2   3   NEXT