A decent cricket game, but not good enough for those seeking an authentic cricket game.
THE GOOD
Cricket 07 has a huge variety of gameplay modes. You can tour a country, play a test or one day series or play a one off test or one day. If you get tired of these options there is a scenario mode where you get to complete tasks from the 2005 ashes test series. And if that still doesn't do it for you, you can play a full season of english county cricket or the Australian domestic season. There is definitely a variety of game modes so no one can really complain about not having enough to do. The game also features squads that consist of a lot players. You can practically select any australian or english player from the domestic set up to play in the national sides which is also really good.
On the field the game has a few good features as well. For instance you can play a fairly wide variety of shots and your bowling options are pretty varied depending on the bowler you use. The gameplay packs enough features to be considered serviceable.
THE BAD
The gameplay might be serviceable but it really falls short in a lot of ways. Sure it has it's good moments but these just barely redeem this game from being below average. You can play a basic array of strokes but it is definitely not as wide as it could be. Batting feels very limited at times. For instance the cover area is always packed with fielders when your batting and your cover drives hardly get through. And cut strokes hardly work because the computer AI never affords you the luxury of having short length balls outside the offstump. Instead you will find scoring on the leg side much easier as you can find a lot of gaps there. It is also insanely easy to slog the ball towards the onside and constantly score a six. Even on the harder difficulty settings you will find yourself scoring a lot of quick runs on the legside.
This kind of sucks the reality out of the game. Cricket is a game where most batsmen like to score runs on the offside, so it's kind of funny when I see that players like Hayden and Gilchrist on my team have scored 95 per cent of their runs on the onside.
It must also be said that scoring runs is easy because the game does not put much emphasis on shot selection or timing but gaps. If you can caress the ball through an open space on the field it will always go to the boundry for four, even if your timing wasn't that good. So unlike real cricket where batsmen score a lot of their runs by running between the wickets, in this game you can make most of your runs by scoring boundaries.
Similar problems extend to the bowling side of the gameplay. Yes the bowlers have a lot of options on thir hands but the bowling is uneven. You will bowl entire teams out for very little runs but it will take a while. In one day matches you can bowl a particular way and get the team out for under 50 runs, but not before the team bats for around 15 to 30 overs. In tests it can take about 50 to 80 overs. Bowling is neither challenging or interesting. You just have to mind numbingly stick to a plan and bowl a lot of overs just to get a team out for low scores. The bowling variations available to your bowler make bowling a little fun.
Since the batting and bowling is perdictable, you will be able to get the hang of both aspects of the game in a week. And before you know it you will be winning matches on the hardest difficulty.
OVERALL
As stated there are a fair amount of shots you can play and the bowlers can bowl a wide amount of variations but in the end these features do not do much to add depth to the game. The wide variety of game modes make it worth while but the gameplay it self will be passable, or perhaps even boring depending on the one playing the game.