Give 'im a full toss!
The actually game mechanics aren’t bad and with practise, a good deal of practise, you’ll find a reasonable playable game in here. But the game itself is flawed in two key areas which are just annoying enough to put EA Cricket 2005 in as 11th man in the batting order.
The first of these is the actually batting itself, which, to be blunt, is a bloody nightmare. To start off with as the bowler approaches you can move around on the crease as much as you like but once he’s into his actual bowling motion you are stuck wherever you ended up. This is a major pain as you’ve no way of knowing where the ball is going to go. In real life you’d be able to move all the time, so why not here? The gluing of your batsman’s feet to the floor effectively leaves you having to trust to luck that you’ll be anywhere in the right place when the ball comes. This is doubly annoying when the bowler serves one short that bounce high… in real life, a short ball with a high bounce is boundary fodder for any half-accomplished batsman but in Cricket 2005 you could well find yourself flailing away or even clipping the ball onto your own wicket as you could be stuck well out of position.
In fact, the majority of the time you’ll find yourself playing defensive shots just to keep your batsman in play. This would be fine in a real life 5 day test match, but I and very few other people have the patience to sit there and play defensive shots all day. Hardly an exciting game to gingerly tap the ball to the nearest fielder every thirty seconds or so. Should you try for something more daring you’ve given yourself a whole new set of problems. Cricket is very much an instinctive, hand to eye co-ordination game and EZ have tried to model that here with poor results. The timing needed for the shots is so stupidly accurate that an atomic clock would be proud. Certainly there’s a large range of shots on offer, but most of them are next to useless. Drives, cuts and glances go practically nowhere and if they do, they’ll more often then not be snapped up by the hyper active fielders.
The only shots that seem to go any distance are the lofted drives, but then you have to be damn careful where you place. The fielders, driven as they are by a computer AI, never make mistakes and will always calculate the quickest route to a free ball. You can expect to see dead cert fours being snaffled up and a waist high drive being deftly plucked from the air by a diving fielder. Their throws into the wicket are so accurate as to be in the sniper division of any modern army. These guys never miss. Even from side on to the wicket the ball will snap in and to further infuriate you, there’s no ‘wind up’ animation for their throws, so you haven’t got a clue when they’re going to lob the ball in, which stops you from sneaking in another run. You never see the AI team ever fumble the ball or throw a ball wide but their bowler will do so in his deliveries with obvious ‘random number generator’ frequency. You can face 5 perfect deliveries then watch a ball go so wide as to have people in the practise nets ducking… hardly realistic.
