Irritatingly Average
It's never a major error, but for people that know the game they can be exceptionally irritating.
In their Snooker games it's not the main game that falls down but the Pool element they've added which, when playing the 9-ball variant of the game, omits the PUSH shot… a deliberate foul that is allowed the shot immediately after the break, in Brian Lara's it's the treatment of extras as part of the bowlers figures.
Leg Byes do not, in the real world, get added to a bowlers figures… but here they do.
You can bowl a feeble team out for under 10 runs, the summary sheet shows that only one batsmen scored any runs, a total of 1, and you'll have seen the umpires signal Leg Bye for all the rest, only to see your bowlers have been charged with all the runs scored by the opposition.
It may be a tiny mistake but it surely its not too much to ask that they get the rules right.
Also irritating is the curse of EA licensing, which means that unless you're playing one of the two major one day competitions Codemasters have been able to get their hands on the players names are changed to something similar, but not too similar, to the real thing, Flintoff becomes Flantiff, Vaughn becomes Vorner and Lee becomes Leap.
You can add one more to the Irritating count in that the game doesn't auto save your profile, if you've unlock something through winning a match or two it'll only be there next time if you save your profile before turning off, and it takes more pad presses than you'd like to simply overwrite your previous profile save.
When you finally get to the game you'll think that this generation never happened, the graphics are functional at best, certainly no real improvement over the previous version of the game which themselves were not much of an improvement over the original PlayStation graphics.
Fielding is still hit and miss, they've tried to add some player interaction into it but it just doesn't work, it seems to make very little difference in the accuracy of the throw to the stumps whether you hit the sweet area of the gauge or not, and even if you do there's a good chance the keeper will fumble the ball or miss it entirely on shorter throws regardless of whether he's the keeper for Bermuda or Australia.
Bowling is dull, they've tried to make it more interesting with confidence meters and the ability to bowl wider of the crease than would normally be the case, just as in real life, but it can't take away from the fact that bowling is the dullest part of the game… the only highlight being that spinners, regardless of ability, can practically turn the ball 90 degrees with the new ball of the first day of a Test Match, not the most realistic inclusion.
The one saving grace of the game is the batting, as realistic as ever, it's a doddle to rattle along at 18 runs per over, if not more for an entire match, as you savage the ball to all parts of the ground, but more often than not through 1 or 2 favourite areas and its no surprise to see your graph when you get to a 50, 100, 200 or 300 runs having the majority of shots all through/over one part of the ground.
The commentary, whilst incorporating many famous names from TV and Radio is highly repetitive, and with the fast moving nature of the simulation the areas where they normally fill in the tedium with banal aimless conversation are just not present in the game so any discussion topic they start on quickly gets cut off but a wicket or a boundary, never to being restarted once the immediate action has finished.
If you can get past the irritations then you'll find a competent enough game, one that can be picked up easily and requires little effort, its certainly one for easy achievements as you can pick up around 500 points for playing just one Test and one ODI against a team of minnows, a task that can be completed in under an hour, but at the end of it the game doesn't break nay new ground, if you've already got the old Xbox or PS2 version then there's little to recommend picking this one up as well.