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International Cricket Captain 2009 - Ashes Edition
For
the most part, there are two types of cricket fans. There are the fans
that adore a good Twenty/20 while sitting around a mates lounge room
enjoying some drinks. Then there is the cricket purist, the one who will
quietly watch and scrutinise over every shot and each bowl for a entire
test season. This game is targeted at the latter.
International Cricket Captain 2009 is a cricketing simulator, putting
you in a management role much the same as games such as Pro Evolution
Soccer did for football. You as a coach, need to choose every single
detail in your team to achieve one of many tournament wins, from local
county, to international tours, to the Ashes series or T20 World Cup.
Once
you have chosen your side and competition, you can go into the sort of
immaculate detail you would expect from a good sim manager. You have the
ability to choose your sides contracts, import or export player, or even
recruit from your youth team. Each player has a current form rating and
fitness rating where things such as physio or training rationing can
impair their match performance. When you eventually get to a satisfied
level with your team and make it to the pitch, there are a mind boggling
amount of options available for each ball. Which shows the level of
detail that is put into this database. You can literally chose each
ball, each shot, exactly how you wish you player to attempt it.
Obviously doing this for every ball would be a extremely tiresome
experience, which is why the 'Auto' button has now been introduced to
keep the action flowing. Once the game is complete you can go through
the maze of statistical data and graphs available from each match and
find exactly where your weak spots are.
As
with all games of this genre, player management is what it's all about.
Ensuring you side all well rested enough to get through a full game at
peak performance, while making sure they're also performing hard enough
to make a impact, and it's a fine balancing act. That same balancing act
can be completely rattled when your higher end players are selected for
internationals, leaving you to pick through the Youth league for the
next Punter or Pup to fill your batting order.
There
has been a massive amount of time spent on getting the player database
for this game current and completely detailed. Featuring the entire
International competition and full English County sides to date, you
have the ability to pick and search from a plethora of players to
improve any missing talent.
The
main fresh introduction to this year's title is the Twenty20 World Cup
and 2009 Ashes series being available for the first time. As well as a
revamped Highlights viewing package, online play mode, and much improved
AI to bring a greater challenge to each match.
Unfortunately, the amount of time spent getting all the statistical data
sharp and improving the AI factor has left a bit of a void. It has
brought the challenge of winning the matches to a new level and it will
immerse you in trawling every avenue possible to find that next edge you
need, but it's at the expense of general enjoyment and replay ability.
Good Sims have a varying degree of layers so that if you start to find
one layer becoming mundane, you can move onto the next and focus on that
until your interest returns. ICC 2009 doesn't have those levels, instead
of introducing a complex franchise management system it's got three
spending options, yet I can bowl a medium-fast ball into one of sixteen
different possible ways. The International Cricket Captain series has
been evolving, very very slowly, but it's evolving. This instalment is
not a big leap from the past few titles, but hopefully is setting up for
something a bit bigger. |
