Cricket Captain 2014 – Review
Management games have existed for a while now, and now a new player steps up. Cricket Coach 2014 shows you what it’s like to orchestrate a team of cricket players and land number one. The game is the fourth installment to the series as it originated in 1997 with Australian Cricket Captain.
Story
You are a manager of a cricket team. There isn’t really much to be said apart from that. The only thing that might change is the team’s nationality. Apart from that your goal remains the same. Lead your team to victory.
Graphics
Cricket Captain is a management game and for the most part you’ll be looking at charts depicting the players aptitude for certain competitions. If you look at the Personal chart, you’ll notice that there’s no picture of the player. The game pays for this in immersion. It feels like you are in charge of a bunch of names without a personality. It’s impossible to know EVERY player in the roster, if only to stop the player from having to log off the game and check out the name on the internet. When you play a competition, the game will sometimes show a 3D rendition of the action. This is a nice touch. At the bottom you’ll find that you can see the ball’s trajectory. It would be nice if you could change the angle of view, so you can see exactly where it landed and where it flew off to.
Sound
The only thing noticeable about the sound is the lack thereof. There is no music when you are setting up your team or waiting for the days to roll by. The only sound is when there’s a 3D rendition and the spectator makes a commentary. That and the babbling of the crowd in the background. When you check in the options menu to see if you can change the volume on the different sound effects, all you find are checkboxes, which means, either you play with sound or you play without.
Gameplay
When you boot up the game you’ll be presented with a couple of choices.
- New game: this will start a new game which will prompt a screen to change the difficulty level and setting of the career.
- Tournament: in which you’ll have a a choice of set ups from official tournaments.
- Load game: here you’ll load up a previous game.
- Internet game: this is where you’ll go against other players.
- Options: you’ll be able to change the settings of the game. Though these are rather limited.
When choosing new game you’ll be presented with a second screen, where you’ll choose which sort of career you’ll want to play.
- English Career: Take control of an English First Class County team and choose to captain your national side.
- Australian Career: Take control of a First Class State Team, a 20 Over team and choose to captain your national side.
- Indian League Career: Take control of an Indian 20 Over team and choose to captain your national side.
- International Career: Choose your test nation to compete in international series, World Cup glory and Number 1 ranking.
What you need to know about the Career mode is that there is no tutorial, so you’ll have to pull your weight right from the get go.
No matter which Career you’ll choose you’ll be able to pick the team’s name. The game changes little whichever Career you pick apart from the different rule set ups and exactly which players you can buy and use in the games. All Career modes have the same game types. First class, 20 over and One day matches.
Once you pick a Career but before you can start a game, you’ll need players. You’ll be given a budget which you can spend on team. The bid will always be what the player demands. But going a little lower doesn’t always yield negative results. What I noticed is that you can only use the + or – sign to lower or highten the value. You can’t type in the value you want. In the long run you’ll have to do a lot of clicking, which could be resolved by just being able to type the value. When you are content with the player set up, you can start a match, you’ll be asked to flip a coin, calling it correctly will give you the edge in which side you’ll start off in. Either the bowling or the batting.
Bowling means throwing the ball at the opposing team. Your job is to hit the wicket or to make sure your team catches the ball and throws it back to ensure the batter doesn’t score as many runs. Or even better yet, play him out the the game. If the batter manages to hit the ball past the ‘oval’ then the team gets 4 runs, if the ball goes over the boundary, then they get 6 runs. So your task as a bowler is to make sure the ball doesn’t go far and prevent the batter from his runs. The screen has a couple of options. You can choose where the ball will be thrown to out of 3 positions. This will alter the positions of the other team mates on the field. Then there’s another option which controls the aggressiveness of the team. This also changes the position of them. Once you’re satisfied with the settings you can bowl. Occasionally the game will give you a 3D rendering of what goes on in the field. It would be nice if you could control camera while it’s happening or even have an option to slow down the action and rewind it, but that’s not the case. So when you see the action played out you’ll have to pay attention.
Depending of the set up of the game you’ll have different rules to abide by, which will character the game and control the length of it. When a player is unable to play, the game won’t automatically boot them out of the team, they’ll notify you and put their name in grey, but it won’t show you if the team member is still on it or not. So you have to select them and add/remove them.
The tournament has a couple of modes to explore.
- Classic England Vs India: play a classic test series from the rivalry between England and India.
When you choose this you’ll be able to choose the year you want to replay. Going back all the way to 1971.
- All Time’s Great Series: play a match from the All Time Great players from the past to the current. Here you’ll be able to play a match and have the pick from all the greatest players who ever played cricket. You’ll choose your team and the opposing team. From there on out you’ll have the choice of which game you’ll be playing. There’s 50 over in 1 match, 3 match or 5 match series. 5 day match in 1 match, 3 match or 5 match series. Lastly there’s the 20 over in 1 or 3 match series.
- Custom Match Series: your series, your rules. Just like in All time Greats you’ll have the same options.
- 20 Over World Cup: here you’ll pick a team and name them, and you’ll go against all the teams in the world.
- One Day World Cup: take part in the 2015 One Day World Cup. Choose a team, name them. Make the right calls on the batter or bowler’s side and bring home the gold.
- Champions Cup: take part in the Champions Cup. You’ll take part in a Champions Cup with a team of your choice.
These tournaments apart from Custom Match series boil down to playing matches and making the decisions on the field or skipping the matches and getting the results. Though skipping a match might seem the easy way out it will rob you of the best part of the game. Coupled with the fact your team will not have their maximum potential at hand, so making the decisions on the field is the best choice.
Conclusion
Cricket Captain 2014 is a management game. With no tutorial and little sound, it is a management game for the purist. The graphics aren’t that great, but the option to skip a match is implemented, although at the cost of the full potential of your team. With a rather expensive pricetag on Steam, there are other Cricket management games which cost less, this is a decent game with a lackluster finish.
Cricket Captain 2014 – Review,
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[…] If you are looking for a quality Cricket management game and don’t want to play a solely online experience, then you might be looking for a long time. To fill that niche, the Cricket Captain series has stepped forward. The latest iteration in the series is Cricket Captain 2015. So don your manager’s cap and bring home the runs. The review of Cricket Captain 2014 can be found here. […]