“Has anyone seen the seam position for different types of deliveries in the game? Is it the way it is supposed to be?”

A year ago, we would’ve been more than happy with a cricket game that got the basics right and just worked. So while this comment on the forums drew chuckles from myself and others, it also helped put things into perspective. Big Ant Studios has got so much right at the first time of asking with Don Bradman Cricket 14 that fans are left to nitpick about minor details such as this. That’s quite an achievement.

I came away from my brief hands-on session with the game in February thoroughly impressed; bowled over, even (first and only cricketing pun, I promise). But I knew in the back of my mind that once I’d have spent a considerable amount of time with the game, its flaws would show themselves – predictable AI patterns being chief among them. But having put over 20 hours into the game, I can honestly say that there’s none of that.

If you set a field and bowl to it, you will be rewarded with the batsmen getting stifled, but err in line, and the AI will punish you.

Don Bradman Cricket 14, as I mentioned in my preview (and so won’t go into much detail here), is a bold departure from how cricket games have played for decades. Here, you use both analogue sticks for foot movement and shot selection while batting and for swing/spin and delivery while bowling. There are no pitch markers to aid you in either batting or bowling. It’s a gameplay system that could have gone horrible wrong, but it works incredibly well. Batting takes concentration and quick reflexes, and so a lot of time to master – I’m certainly nowhere close to it yet. The AI impresses as well. If you set a field and bowl to it, you will be rewarded with the batsmen getting stifled, but err in line, and it will punish you. Bowling is easily my favourite aspect of the game. Spending the better part of an over setting up the opposition batsman to knick one to the keeper off the last ball feels more rewarding here than anything in any other cricket game ever has.

Fielding too has got its due. You can either take complete control over fielding or just have control over throws and catches, and here too, you have options – you can throw at the keeper/bowler or directly at the stumps. In the career mode, where I’ve spent much of my time in the game, you can actually stand around in the outfield hoping the ball comes your way. You can chase it down, slide and pull it back just before it crosses the rope. You can choose to attempt a diving a catch or be safe and choose instead to not give away the extra runs.

The career mode is a first for cricket games, and while it isn’t all there just yet, it is an addictive time sink that’s had me up till 4 am.

The career mode in Don Bradman Cricket 14 is a first for cricket games, and while it isn’t all there just yet, it is an addictive time sink that’s had me up till 4 am. You begin by picking any playing position for your user-created 16-year old rookie – even wicketkeeper. There begins a 20-year quest to become the Test captain of your country, gradually shaping your domestic and international careers along the way across T20, ODI and Test disciplines. You can participate in every delivery of every match, or skip the parts that don’t directly involve you. The career mode, while a lot of fun, is also rather skeletal in structure (at least the bits I’ve played so far). There’s no sense of belonging to a team, and not much reward (other than in XP) for winning your team a match or penalty for repeated poor performances. That said, this is a great starting point for future games to build on.

The Big Ant team’s love of cricket is evident in the game’s attention to detail and in the attempt to deliver as realistic a cricket simulation as possible, and the customisation options play a major role in it. There are few official licenses here, but you can still have a fairly accurate Indian team and IPL roster in the game thanks to the Bradman Cricket Academy, which lets players create players, teams and even umpires, and then share them with others. You can replace all the default teams with those created by the community with the press of a button when you first start the game. It’s a powerful, community-driven system that makes official licenses almost redundant.

My biggest gripe is with the running between the wickets and how laboured runners sometimes are when getting to the crease.

Don Bradman Cricket 14 isn’t without it flaws though. My biggest gripe is with the running between the wickets and how laboured runners sometimes are when getting to the crease. This leads to soft run-outs that will leave you stumped (I just had to. Besides, “bowled over” is probably a bowling pun anyway). The visuals aren’t the best in the business either, with framerate fluctuations and screen tearing a common occurrence. It’s also a little annoying to have to invert the batting controls when switching camera angles from the batsman’s perspective to the bowler’s. Speaking of camera angles, this is once again an area where Big Ant has cut no corners. There are multiple camera angles to choose from, including first-person, not only while batting and bowling, but also when fielding/running.

The game does support multiplayer, both online and offline (with co-op to be patched in later), and while the game does handle online lag reasonably well, and even lets you save online matches, there are some issues here that could sour the experience. There’s often no sound of bat on ball, the ball sometimes teleports into the keeper’s gloves once past the batsman, and once a shot is played into the outfield, it takes a while for the camera to switch to a wider angle, which gives you less time to take run. All of these issues can be rectified over time, but as things stand, the online experience, while enjoyable, is far from ideal.

Saying Don Bradman Cricket 14 is a great platform on which Big Ant Studios can build a successful franchise would be a disservice to it, because it’s a brilliant cricket game in and of itself. Sure, there’s a lot that could be better, but as the past has repeatedly shown, it could also have been considerably worse. It isn’t here just to fill a void, but with its many new ideas and gameplay innovations, it’s here to define the genre. So forget what you loved before; this is how cricket games should be.

Don Bradman Cricket 14 is available now at Amazon for Xbox 360 and PS3