Cricket 24 First Impressions: Big Ant’s Latest Clunky Cousin of Sports Sims Stays at the Crease
It's difficult to translate the complexities of cricket into the cadence of a video game. Where the moment-to-moment dynamism of football and basketball lends itself naturally to arcade-style sports games like FIFA and NBA 2K, cricket's languid delights don't quite fit the formula. The usual sports sim approach, which is based on a 12-minute exercise in instant gratification, cannot capture the experience of a sport where a large chunk of a match is spent standing around. That's where Big Ant Studios' Cricket series takes a different route.
The Australian developer's deeply flawed but admirably meticulous and oddly satisfying simulacrum of the gentleman's game has tried to bottle the slow-burn drama of the sport over several iterations with mixed results. Cricket 24, the studio's latest cricket sim — out today on PC and consoles — retreads similar ground. It carries over and builds upon the successes of its predecessors, but it also replicates a lot of their failures. During my three-hour hands-on preview of Cricket 24 at a recent PlayStation launch event, I got the full spectrum of the experience, ranging from fun to frustrating, that I've come to expect from the series.
During the gameplay preview, I got a chance to explore the different game modes, check out the licensed team rosters in the game, and take part in a couple of matches to get a feel of how Cricket 24 plays. Of course, to experience the game fully and dive into all that it offers for an in-depth review would require one to spend more hours in the game, but from my hands-on preview experience, it seems that much of it is familiar territory, with a few new bells and whistles. If you've dabbled in the Cricket series from Big Ant and played any of the recent
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