ICC Pro Cricket 2015, apparently the “Official Game of the ICC Cricket World Cup 2015” developed by Indiagames and launched on iOS, Android and PC. Indiagames hosted a fancy Launch Event for the game recently. The Android and iOS versions of the game aren’t that bad, does the PC version hold its own? Read on to find out.
Our story begins with the publishers sending us a game code with no directions whatsoever on how we redeem it. I tried Steam, but alas, no Steam support, so there’s one checkbox you DONT need to tick. A few mails back and forth later, I managed to download the “legit” 200MB copy of the so called ICC Pro Cricket 2015 PC. So authentic was the process, the game doesn’t even have a proper setup/installer. Just an executable file, like we’re living in the 90s.
Firing the game up for the first time, I noticed that there is no 16:10 or 16:9 resolution support in the game. Again, the 90s. God I miss the 90s. Remember Cricket Ashes 97? Yeah, those were the days. But this is 2015 and this is ICC Pro Cricket 2015, but props to the game for taking me back to a pre-25 years era. The menu buttons and images for the PC version are the same ones used for the mobile version, so on a high resolution screen they look blown up and massively pixelated. Ah, the low-res 90s again.
Excuse my sarcasm but to be honest, all these things don’t really matter, if the game is good and fun to play. That is what I hoped for, since this being the “official” World Cup game and all. You can play with either the keyboard or the mouse as the game suggested, but the keyboard doesn’t work. There are no keyboard shortcuts. Even the “ESC” key doesn’t work, meaning that there is no Escape menu. So there is no way to go to the menu and quit the game. Alt+F4 is the only option.
Modes offered in ICC Pro Cricket 2015 are World Cup, a Quick Play mode and a Career mode called World Tour. Matches in these modes are limited to 5-10 overs. If you want to play a 50 over match, you can only do so in the Quick Play mode. So much for being the official Cricket World Cup game when you can’t even play a proper game of cricket in World Cup mode. That’s understandable, because 50 overs take long, but I know as a fact that there are hardcore gamers who would love a 50 over game.
I played my first match after a brief training walkthrough that introduces the game’s mechanics, or lack there-of. If you’re bowling, you have to draw the desired path of delivery with the mouse, the speed of delivery depends on the speed of drawing the path. Not a bad idea, but sadly, no matter how many permutations of paths you try, the game dumbs it down to just three paths. So turns out, there’s not really much depth in the bowling mechanics, and it gets predictable really, really soon. At times, the bowler’s run up path was right through the umpire’s body. If you bowl a very wide ball which the keeper can’t catch, there is no mechanic for follow through (the ball going behind the keeper) and the game forces you to the next ball. So if the ball could have gone all the way to the boundary, the game doesn’t have any mechanic to accommodate this event. So now I question, is this really cricket because it really doesn’t seem so.
Talking about the batting, which works only with the mouse, is quite interesting, just like how bowling was. Disney claims to have 50 different shots in the game whose animation has been motion captured. You choose the direction where you want to hit the ball, and then whether you want to play a lofted shot or a grounded shot. The game then automatically decides which shot you’re going to play. I don’t mind this mechanic, that’s if it works well because in this case, it doesn’t. The game lacks any form of rag doll and physics. When hitting the ball, there is no physical connection between the bat and the ball, its just animations mashed up together. Running between the wickets is simple, you click to run, but you can’t cancel your run. There is also no inclusion of a mechanic to change the position of the batsman, or to charge down the line.
Fielding is not as interesting as batting and bowling, for one simple reason, you can’t field. Fielding is fully automatic. Throwing is fully automatic. To make matters more entertaining, most close throws are almost always direct hits. You can’t even set the field to how you’d like to, although there are a few presets to choose from. A complete lack of a physics engine derails fielding too. There is no link in the fielder following the path of the ball to pick it up, it is again a game of empty, meaningless animations.
Things are made worse by freemium elements in the game. Mind you, ICC Pro Cricket 2015 costs INR 699, yet the game is lauded with freemium mechanics that even free-to-play games would shy of. In Career mode, you can buy Player Cards and packs. It works like how EA’s FIFA Ultimate Team works. You can train players using in-game coins. Training players takes time, you can speed up the training process by dishing out real-life money. After playing a few games, I realised that playing a match actually requires no skill once you get the gist of it. It is only a matter of what stats your player cards have. Indiagames admitted that it is possible to unlock all the content if you’re willing to grind. The game runs like crap too. Even on my SLI GeForce GTX 770 set up, it ran at 10-15 fps and not even on a 1080p resolution.
ICC Pro Cricket 2015 is not a game of cricket. It might have all the teams and all the players, but a lack of depth, physics and mechanics makes this empty shell that only focuses on it’s card meta game, which is not even original to say the least. The game doesn’t follow the simplest rules of the sport, and doesn’t have any inclusion of some core mechanics like byes and leg byes. Like cancelling a run. Bowlers run right through the bodies of umpires, as if they were ghosts. It is clear that Indiagames wants ICC Pro Cricket 2015 to be catered to a fast paced audience more suited for mobile phones. This is game is much better on the iOS and Android, but on the PC, this is the worst INR 699 you would ever spend in your life.
