Don Bradman Cricket 14 may bear the name of the greatest batsman to ever play the game, but the finished product is designed to behave less like The Don and more like a certain modern day member of the Australian top order. It’s extremely capable and occasionally brilliant, but with a tendency to undo all of its hard work with the odd baffling error in judgement or apparent technical fault. In short, it’s the Shane Watson of cricket games.
Despite its overall inconsistency, Don Bradman Cricket 14 is certainly the most ambitious cricket game in recent memory. Long term fans of the sport and its videogame incarnations will have grown accustomed to infrequent and uninspired iterations on a gameplay blueprint that was first drafted by Codemasters some 15 years ago for Shane Warne Cricket '99 (or Brian Lara Cricket '99 if you live outside of Australia and New Zealand). Thankfully, DBC 14 throws most of that dated design document out of the window.
For starters, bowling is now both challenging and fun. Seriously. Delivering the ball is an entirely analogue process; you use the left thumbstick to alter the direction of the swing or seam whilst pulling back on the right thumbstick and pushing forward to release the ball in order to approximate the movements of the bowler as he hurtles through the crease. The worse you time each flick of the thumbstick, the more prone you are to overstepping, losing some speed or spraying a wide either side of the batsman.
During my first few overs with the game I was sending down enough garbage to make England’s Jade Dernbach seem like merely the second worst bowler on Earth, yet once I got to grips with it I found that there was a remarkable amount of nuance afforded by the system. With practice I could land the ball on a reasonably metronomic McGrath-like line and length, but if I messed up my timing or direction even slightly I was often punished as a result. Not only did this tend to bring a more realistic variety to my bowler’s pitch map (at least once I had removed the training wheels of the onscreen bowling guide), but it also made it all the more rewarding on the occasions I was able to nail a perfectly pitched inswinger that swerved back to castle a batsman through the gate.
The overhauled design of the bowling system also has a direct impact on the feel of the batting; namely that with the absence of a bowling reticule on the pitch, batting is a far more reactionary experience in DBC 14. Since you can no longer camp on the telegraphed ‘delivery zone’ reticule of each ball bowled with your finger firmly clamped down on the aggressive shot trigger, you’re instead forced to play each ball on its own merits. Once a ball is delivered you only have a short period of time to judge its line and length before adjusting the batsman’s weight between the front and back foot (with the left stick) and actually playing the shot (with the right). Premeditated strokes are still entirely possible – there’s even a shoulder button modifier that allows you to play more outlandish shots such as reverse pulls and sweeps – but they come fraught with an appropriate amount of peril, and you can indeed make the mistake of crouching down too early for a ramp shot only to have a shorter than expected delivery rear up and smash into your helmet grill.
In almost every facet of the DBC 14 experience, the development team at Big Ant has displayed a passion and understanding for the sport and spectacle that’s equal to that of the game’s intended audience. It’s evident in the fact that not only is there a button for manual appealing, but also for walking even when you’re given not out – for those chivalrous Adam Gilchrist types among you (although good luck finding someone who’ll actually use it on Xbox Live or PSN).
The atmosphere is enhanced by how the crowd jeers when a bowler pulls up short in his run up, or the way batsmen nervously bump knuckles after surviving a close appeal. The presence of a DRS-inspired review system also lends an extra layer of drama, and having an LBW decision overturned after the hotspot has revealed a thick inside edge on the bat is truly exhilarating. Also, I’m particularly fond of the ability to stand at the top of your mark and enigmatically shine the ball on your thigh for near-inappropriate amounts of time while the batsman waits.
The 20-year-long Career option, whilst not as well presented here as those in big budget equivalents like FIFA or NBA 2K, is also a welcome addition for the die hards. That said, perhaps Big Ant’s most ingenious move has been the way it has handled player licensing, or a lack thereof. Don Bradman is the only officially licensed player in a game that features all of the international teams plus domestic teams from Australia, England and India; every other player in the game is a soundalike. However (and provided your console is connected to the internet) you can quickly populate the squads with real names and likenesses thanks to the database of user-created players that already number in the thousands, from modern names like Steyn and Tendulkar to the greats from yesteryear. Accentuated by the fact that Big Ant has cannily recorded the commentators saying the surnames of almost every real life cricket player of note, and the game manages to feel near enough to a fully-licensed experience (you can even force the commentators to refer to Ian Bell as ‘The Sherminator’, on the off chance that you’re actually Shane Warne).
Unfortunately, and perhaps fittingly for a cricket game, it’s not until after a few days of play that the cracks in the surface begin to reveal themselves. A lot of these problems are merely bugs – the bowler will randomly switch to around the wicket between deliveries, catches will be given out off a no-ball free hit and the commentators will frequently make repetitive and at times entirely inaccurate observations. On one particular occasion when I managed to smash a six to win a Twenty20 match off the final ball it was met with complete silence from the commentary box, as though they’d both suddenly dropped dead from the excitement.
But these glitches – and there are many more examples – aside, there are a number of curious design choices that have an adverse impact on the experience. The biggest of these is the developer’s decision to do away with the traditional fielding radar entirely, instead forcing the batsman to switch to a first person view between deliveries to take a 360 degree look around the field in order to spot the gaps. I can appreciate the sense of realism that they were going after, but in practice it just doesn’t work. Since you can’t get a sense of where fielders are at a glance once a shot has been played, you’re largely dependent on a slightly wonky camera system when deciding whether to run or not. I found myself almost exclusively scoring in either singles or boundaries, since judging a two or three was near impossible when the camera was following the ball and I had no idea how far away the fielder offscreen was.
The running between wickets problem is further compounded by the fact that every fielder in the game seems to be in the possession of a laser-guided missile launcher for a throwing arm, so you can set off for what appears to be a comfortable single, only to have a fielder appear seemingly out of nowhere and knock the stump out of the ground from deep square leg, and it happens far too often.
Meanwhile spin bowling feels a touch more laborious than the previously mentioned pace, since for each delivery bowled you need to quickly rotate the left stick several times during the bowler’s stride to determine the amount of revolutions placed on the ball. Setting aside the potential this system has to put unnecessary Mario Party-esque wear and tear on your controller, it just feels considerably more unwieldy than the method used for bowling pace. I would have preferred if the amount of spin on the ball was determined simply by how far you pushed the left stick in any given direction, and as a result bowling spin just isn’t that much fun.
Lastly, for a cricket game that’s so revolutionary in terms of controls it’s a shame that the developers haven’t done a better job of easing players into its considerable changes. There’s a rudimentary timing indicator for batting in the game’s practice nets, but curiously it can’t be activated during a match even though the equivalent bowling guide can. At any rate it’s not really enough, and with the absence of any meaningful tutorial modes some players might be overwhelmed by the steep learning curve inherent to both batting and bowling – particularly if they’re used to the slog-tastic batting and simplified bowling setups of cricket games gone by.
THE VERDICT
Playing Don Bradman Cricket 14 is a bit like trying to coach Kevin Pietersen; persevere with it and you’ll be rewarded, but you have to go into it willing to take the good with the bad. Big Ant should be commended for attempting to reinvent the cricket game experience and imbuing it with gameplay depth and fidelity unheard of in the genre to date, but there are just a few too many bugs and quirky design choices that hinder the overall experience. Many of these could theoretically be patched post-release and convert Don Bradman Cricket 14’s decent start into a big score, but for now it can only really be recommended for true cricket tragics.
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