Indiagames, the Interactive Business arm of Disney India, announced the impending launch of the official ICC Cricket World Cup 2015 game at an event held in their Mumbai Office that iLL was invited to. This new cricket game is called ICC Pro Cricket 2015 and will be available soon for PCs, iOS and Android devices and on DTH networks. It has a different pricing scheme based on the platform with the PC version requiring an initial payment of $9.99, the DTH version requiring a monthly subscription charge that varies based on the operator and the Mobile version being a Freemium model. There will be optional microtransactions across all formats however.
After a short introduction and a Q&A session about the game, we were able to get some hands on time with it. Our impressions are as follows:
ICC Pro Cricket 2015 is a Unity game, which means it should have good portability across the multiple game platforms. The game is best played on touchscreens we found, simply due to the intuitiveness of the controls. On PC, it can be played with both a controller and a Keyboard/Mouse with the latter being slightly superior. The game has a World Cup mode, a Quick Play mode and a Career mode called world tour. Most of the matches in these modes are limited to 5-10 over affairs to remain entertaining. There is the option to play 50 over games in Quick Play mode for the hardcore fans. The control scheme of ICC Pro Cricket 2015 while one is bowling is based on choosing a length and then drawing the desired path of your delivery. The speed of the delivery depends on the speed of drawing this path. While you can get creative with the path, the game will only choose the final path based on three points. There are a bunch of preset field setting but you can’t set a custom field.
The ICC Pro Cricket 2015 tends to force you to bowl first, but the batting controls are also quite interesting. You get the option of two camera views. The Disney team claims to have included over 50 different shots in the game. The animations are all motion captured though they seem erratic at times. There is also a card game involved in the career mode, which lets you manage a team using a roster of player cards. Cards can be combined to upgrade them and card packs can be bought with either ingame currency or real world money. Disney assured us that the game can be fully unlocked without having to use the microtransactions, if you are willing to grind.
ICC Pro Cricket 2015 did have a few flaws that may be corrected later on. Some of these include the lack of an option to save a game in progress. The game does save your career and tournament progression though. While the graphics are fine for a mobile game, the PC audience might be a little disappointed. There is no multiplayer mode though there are plans for an asynchronous multiplayer mode. Player skill is not representative of their real world counterparts for the sake of balance. Since this is the official ICC licensed game, all the players participating in the World Cup are represented by their real names in the game and there won’t be any licence issues for that.
ICC Pro Cricket 2015 seems to have taken inspiration from other successful sports franchises as is evident from some of its gameplay systems. Future plans for the game include a possible Steam release for the PC version and balancing changes and bugfixes post launch. We will be doing a full review once the game releases, so take our impressions with a pinch of salt. Bleed Blue or whatever, this is iLL signing off.[divider]
