But, again, unlike EA's Cricket effort the breakthroughs make sense when they come on the end of variation and building up bowler skill in a manner similar to batting. Switch roles and you'll find bowling quite comfortable but breakthroughs difficult. As you move up, you have to work harder to achieve the same results. On lower levels, you can slog that over your shoulder. By the end, your tactics will make sense and you can even reposition the field yourself to get what you want out of a bowling attack. On the lower difficulties it's just a case of positioning yourself to sweep the ball impressively to wherever the field is weakest.Īs you start to get better at building up to big strokes, you can afford to move up to a higher difficulty level where the need for strategy becomes more intense and the opposition more creative.
Defend a few successfully and your confidence builds up and boundaries become a more realistic prospect. Going in to bat, you can play shots on the front or back foot or defend, and scoring runs is a question of judging the delivery in flight and then timing your shot and directing it with the analogue stick.
Pick it up for a quick One Day International and you barely have to read the manual for more than five seconds to know the score. Brian Lara starts off gratifying - with simple, convincing actions and results whether batting or bowling - and in the longer term demonstrates a degree of subtlety that gives you cause to keep slogging away contentedly.
That game's obscure and often inexplicable mechanics only seem to yield results after hours and hours spent groping around in the dark - and even then you realise that the actual logic and design is pretty daft anyway. There's certainly little question that it does a better job than EA's latest Cricket title - arguably it's only convincing competition. Swordfish Studios must be applauded, in which case, because Brian Lara International Cricket 2005 is decidedly entertaining and convincingly balanced - even if there are a few occasions when you feel like you're the bloke with the riot shield and someone just knifed you in the leg for good measure. Imagine trying to balance that so both sides are having fun. To stick with CS, making cricket work as a game must be a bit like giving the Terrorists a stash of sub-machineguns and a lone Counter-Terrorist nothing but a riot shield - and telling him to defuse the bomb in-between being shot repeatedly and then having his bullets bounced back from all corners of the room. Playing a team-based shooter like Counter-Strike is a similar equation there's push and pull, but you can usually rely on consistency of personnel and technique. In football, for example, you've got 11 players with different roles, but apart from a few tactical variations both teams are essentially competing for the same thing at the same time. The balance between attack and defence is always a difficult thing to get right in team games.