Cricket 14 Xbox 360

 Don Bradman Cricket 14 is certainly the most ambitious cricket game in recent memory. Long term fans of the sport and its videogame incarnations will have grown accustomed to infrequent and uninspired iterations on a gameplay blueprint that was first drafted by Codemasters some 15 years ago for Shane Warne Cricket '99 (or Brian Lara Cricket '99 if you live outside of Australia and New Zealand). Thankfully, DBC 14 throws most of that dated design document out of the window.

For starters, bowling is now both challenging and fun. Seriously. Delivering the ball is an entirely analogue process; you use the left thumbstick to alter the direction of the swing or seam whilst pulling back on the right thumbstick and pushing forward to release the ball in order to approximate the movements of the bowler as he hurtles through the crease. The worse you time each flick of the thumbstick, the more prone you are to overstepping, losing some speed or spraying a wide either side of the batsman.

During my first few overs with the game I was sending down enough garbage to make England’s Jade Dernbach seem like merely the second worst bowler on Earth, yet once I got to grips with it I found that there was a remarkable amount of nuance afforded by the system. With practice I could land the ball on a reasonably metronomic McGrath-like line and length, but if I messed up my timing or direction even slightly I was often punished as a result. Not only did this tend to bring a more realistic variety to my bowler’s pitch map (at least once I had removed the training wheels of the onscreen bowling guide), but it also made it all the more rewarding on the occasions I was able to nail a perfectly pitched inswinger that swerved back to castle a batsman through the gate.

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