Has the potential to be a great cricket game, but fails in the small details.
Cricket 2005 has great graphics and the potential for great gameplay, but the lack of CPU responsivity take away from the experience. I examine the aspects of the game in more detail below:
1. Sound: The sounds are very authentic but the commentary is abyssmal. The same cliches are repeated over and over again, to the point where it just becomes plain annoying. Even the commentary selection is flawed: For example, if I time my shot perfectly, but choose the totally wrong shot thus missing the ball, Jim Maxwell will still say "Good shot!"
Bowling a wide that the batsman edges to the keeper will always WITHOUT FAIL prompt the commentator to say "The ball should be pitched just outside the offstump" even though the ball got someone out. Afte a while it seems that EA just got Benaud and Maxwell in a studio for 30 minutes and made them read from a script.
The crowd noises seem generic and unrealistic too, because in a Aus vs Bangladesh game in Australia, the crowd cheers as wildly when a Aussie gets out as it does when an Aussie gets a wicket. There is no louder cheering for the hometeam, its always at the same pitch.
Graphics: The graphics are very good, with players' faces created perfectly. One place where EA fails is the umpire model. Since when did umpires become cloned blooped up caricatures??
Gameplay: Batting is HARD. Thats it. Practise at the nets is useless because of the inane commentry, and also you dont know where the ball would actually go. You cant always tell if a shot that flew off the bat hit the middle of the bat or was just edged because everything happens so fast. The fielders are like superfast, and you will never ever find a gap unless you're really lucky. Apparently a pace bowler can run you out by running to midwicket and throwing the ball back before you can make one run...
Bowling is easier, but takes a lot of practice too. There is a certain generic spot for each bowler that you can always bowl to to make them play in a certain way. For some reason bowling on the keyboard is really easy on the keyboard but really hard on a controller. Practising at the nets do help, but the totally POS commentary (piece of sh*t) makes you not want to practice.
Fielding: This is where the game fails the most; the fielders are superfast and you will never ever beat them or find the gap, and the computer NEVER changes the fielding. I once hit 4 4's in a row in the same exact spot, but not once did a fielder get put in that spot throughout the game, even though I kept on hitting in that EXACT SAME SPOT for both singles and boundaries.
All in all, the game fails one's expectations, but in a market where this is the only cricket game available gamers have no choice but to hope for a better game soon. On my part, I just wish the next version of Cricket would have even a pale shadow of the wonderfully dynamic commentary of FIFA or NFL.