As the name would suggest, this is primarily meant to be a game on the Ashes. But a game with only two teams wont really sell, so they decided to include all the other teams in ICC, just without licenses.
But if you can manage to sacrifice the time to manually rename all the players of all the teams excepting the licensed England and Australia, the game is actually pretty playable.
Codemasters has removed a huge amount of bugs from Cricket 07, and has almost made this game worthy of a few dozen hours of game play. The licensed teams have player likeness, but the graphics overall has improved a lot. Textures are better and limbs are smoothened out. The pitch looks really good under proper conditions too. The new catching system goes a long way in making headway towards glorious cricketing.
Yet the lack of investments in making exclusive animations suffer in a game of cricket. All bowlers still bowl with the same bowling action, and stroke play is still the same for all. This makes merely the rating of a player the most important factor in his getup. The control scheme has completely changed to allow more freedom to keyboard players, and that tries to cover up for the mediocrity in the 22 yards. Tests, ODIs, Ashes are present in game options, but once you play a couple of matches, you’ll hardly want to play the tedious test series doing the same thing over and over again.
That being said, lets not ignore the improvements made in the title. Coin tosses are present, umpires look lively, the replay camera is somewhat passable for acceptability, and crowd noises cover up the stadium pretty much every time. The commentary team however stand tall with the likes of Ian Bishop, Shane Warne, etc constantly eyeing your every move, often with clever and interesting inputs on the situation.
Cricket games will suffer without licensing the teams, and given the limited amount of customization, the joy of playing as a team greatly lessens. But the game mechanics have improved and only with significant investments in the future can this sport game rise to the periphery with the others in the league.