Way too easy to be fun

User Rating: 4 | Brian Lara International Cricket 2007 X360
Codemasters come out with their latest effort in the Brian Lara cricket series, and it has many of the same problems as last time, the most irritating of which is that it is way too easy. The first game I played was as England against Australia on county level and I has soon scored over 1000 runs for the loss of one wicket. Not only did I get such a score for only one wicket but it also came up in an incredibly fast time, getting over 20 runs in an over is the norm in this game, about as far removed from Test Match Cricket as they could get.

Even though its easy there is still something satisfying about a well timed shot for four, more so on Test level, and taking wickets but these are small plus points in a game where winning doesn't really hold any meaning, you are never in trouble of losing a match.

The graphics are not great although Hawkeye is a nice edition, and they've made it so you can't look at the full scorecards for a match, once an innings is finished all you can see relating to it is the summary which shows the best batsmen and bowlers. Within 10 minutes of playing you will want to strangle the wicket-keeper, everytime the ball is thrown to him he has to take the time to knock the wickets over an appeal, even if the batsmen is well in his crease, that quickly becomes tiresome.

As for the achievements, most can be scored in your first two games, the win 8 World Cups with 8 different teams is a long slog that involves playing 88 matches. The only difficult achievement is hitting 6 sixes in a single over, hitting boundaries is easy but making every one a six requires good timing, it was the only achievement on here that I felt satisfied with when I got it.

Codemasters need to go away and watch a few cricket matches, they've tried to make the games short with big scores to appeal to non-cricket fans who probably won't buy the game anyway, gamers who watch Test cricket will have the patience to play a proper cricket game which takes skill and patience.