Ashes Cricket 2009 – Review

It’s quite fitting that today heralds the arrival of the latest cricket game to our videogame retailers’ shelves. Hopefully today will also see the start of England cruising to take a 2-0 lead overall in the Ashes as the fourth test starts at Headingly. A brilliant day for cricket all round. Apart from the fact that Andrew “Freddy” Flintoff is out of the test after failing his fitness test late this morning. Anyhow, I digress, back onto the subject at hand.

Ashes Cricket 2009, developed on the 360, PC and PS3 by Transmission and for the Wii by Gusto Games, is a blinder of a cricket game bringing into play all the elements of a real cricket match onto your console. You can play either the full Ashes series, a ODI (One Day International), a Twenty20 competition or a simple 20 over game. Each type of game allows you to select the usual easy, normal or hard settings and you can select from almost all the international sides. You can also edit squads, introduce your own player, and manage the full team if you so wish by making team selections, fielding positions, running order etc; Or, you could just let the game do it and get on with playing some cricket.

During my four day review of the game I managed to play a quick 20/20 match against Australia, and lost, quite heavily in fact. The Australians managed a good 154/5 after winning the toss. I managed a paltry 45/all out. Then I turned my attention to a multiplayer match over Xbox Live which was great fun. After that I tried the first match in the Ashes series. Which I won, convincingly. Anyhow, I’ll break each of these game types down into more detail.

The main essence of the game can be easily broken down into two parts, batting and fielding. When you’re at the crease you have to watch the bowler closely to see which type of ball they’re bowling. The only indication you get is an idea of where the bowler was intending to bounce the ball, but even then the bowler can change their mind before bowling it. To hit the ball you have to time your stroke and again this changes completely with every ball so it’s not easy, but once you get into the swing of it you can get it pretty spot-on. Depending on the ball and how confident the batsman is you can go for a defensive shot, an attacking shot or a lob. You can also decide, if you wish, whether you’re going to step out onto your front-foot to get at the ball earlier, or step back to get those difficult balls. Pressing nothing means you leave the ball alone and let it pass through.

The left thumbstick indicates where you’d like the ball to go and specifying a foot as you bat narrows the direction so you can be more precise. I generally only lobbed when the fielding was tight in and I was certain of getting it passed the fielders for a nice 6. However, if the timing is off and you clip the ball, or just get it a little less than perfect you could be walking off the pitch a little earlier than planned. After hitting the ball you get a little meter which tells you if you were perfectly timed, a little off, or just downright poor. This enables you to work on your timing with the bowler. Bear in mind though that once the bowler has done his over you essentially start again with your timing, every bowler is different.

Once you’ve hit the ball you can run, obviously there’s little point if you can see it going for a 4 or a 6 but should the fielder get there first you’re going to have to have started running already. Pressing the Y button on the 360 controller starts the run off, and if you feel you have time you can press it again to queue up another run. I normally managed two runs off balls that were heading for a four. If you mis-time it you end up getting run-out, and if it’s a close call then the umpire will call into play the third umpire and we all get to watch a lovely replay. LBWs are a little more difficult for the umpires and true-to-life they don’t always get it right, as the in-game HawkEye has great pleasure in proving. And it does swing both ways sometimes my batsmen were given out when the ball was clearly going to head over the stumps, other times I got lucky and the umpire waves away the cheers of the Auzzies, only to be proved wrong by the HawkEye replay.

Fielding, bowling and catching are just as timing specific as batting. But it’s not in any way detrimental to the game. Anyone who has played cricket will know that no-one on the pitch can take their eye off the ball. Catching is a great indicator of this. If the ball is heading towards your fielder and it’s a catching chance then the camera will chance to the specific fielder, the ball will fly towards them and an indicator around the ball will show whether or not it can be caught. A red ring indicates the fielder has no chance, but as the ball moves closer it will change, first to orange, then to green. At orange the fielder has around a 60/40 chance of catching it. If you keep watching the ball though and press A the moment it turns green you will stand a better chance of catching it. For the out-field feilders its obviously a little easier, they have more time, and you can watch the ball closely. For the wicket-keeper though it’s a little more tricky, you really do have to watch intensly as you bowl as you only get a second or two to catch it before the chance is gone.

Bowling is just as much fun as batting. Select your bowler and then the type of ball you want to bowl. As the player runs up to the crease the timing bar appears as does the placement circle. Using the left stick you move the placement circle where you want the ball to bounce. Using the trigger buttons you can turn the spin or the seam, whilst also watching the timing bar to make sure you bowl a good ball and not give away a run with a foul bowl or a wide. Get the timing and the placement just right and whilst you’re not guaranteed to get the batsman out you’re at least giving him something to think about and there’s a very good chance it’ll clip the bat, go for an LBW or he’ll get it completely wrong and you’ll hear the sweet sound of bails flying off the stumps.

The fielding options in this game are vast, however I let the game do the work by just using one of the many presets. Moving your fielders dependant on the type of ball you’re about to bowl is a great way to line up a catch. For example, get your fielders lined up on the boundary behind the bowler, bowl the batsman a ball he can’t resist a lob on and watch it fly over the bowler into the hands of your waiting catcher. It feels nice, but it doesn’t work all the time. In fact I couldn’t find a situation that would work all the time. I had to keep changing depending on who has at the crease, the confidence levels of the bowler and batsman and whether or not the team was under pressure or not. As the batsman starts getting perfect timing his confidence levels will rise and you’ll start to see it becomes easier to get a perfect hit. Line them up for nice lob and six-runs are yours. However, if the batsman hits them wrong his confidence levels will drop to the point of trying to lob only results in the inevitable catch and a walk back to the pavilion.

One of the problems most sports games face is the limit to which commentary can be used, and playing three hours of cricket to see off just one of the games in an Ashes series could fill a player with dread at hearing the same commentary time and time again, and I was pleased to hear and see during the first 20-over match I played that the commentary team changed. Featuring the likes of Sir Ian Botham, Shane Warne, Ian Bishop, Jonathan Agnew and Tony Greig it made for a very varied run of audio. Unfortunately whilst playing the Ashes first-game the commentary team didn’t change once and I got a little annoyed at hearing how the third batsman is so important for the fifth time. I hope there’s a patch for this small bug quickly as it could get annoying if the same commentary team start off the second day.

The graphics are detailed which each famous cricket ground lovingly captured including the atmosphere. The noisy grounds are as noisy as they are on TV, and the english grounds fill up as the days’ play progresses. One obvious part of the cricket game is the weather and it’s also replicated nicely with the english grounds looking overcast. Though I didn’t get rained off, which I expected to be as this game really does recreate all aspects of the game.

If you’re new to cricket you will love the Legends Coaching as Beefy and Warne take you through the batting, bowling and fielding lessons. There’s the standard lessons such as timing your bat stroke and your learning how to place spin on the ball. There’s also the more advanced lessons as well including learning how to understand what fielding layouts work best with which bowling type. At no point during the lessons did I not enjoy them. Each lesson involves either Sir Ian Botham or Shane Warne telling you what they want you to do, then advising you if you got it wrong. It works well and you quickly get a grip on a sport where other games before hand have failed to make the learning curve easy to climb.

I must admit I was a little apprehensive at playing Ashes Criket 2009 as before hand I’ve never been a great fan of cricket as a video game but this has completely changed me. It’s a great game that I would implore any cricket fan to go out and get.

Our rating

8/10