📖 7 min read
Fully licensed Pakistan team and PSL tournament
Batting and bowling animations are top-notch
In-depth career mode with a solid character creator
Wide range of modes, series and tournaments available to play
Poor tutorialisation of certain areas of gameplay
Fielding animations and bugs can shatter immersion
Appeals more to a niche audience
Score: 4.5/7 — A solid all-round offering for hardcore cricket fans
Price: Rs13,000 (PlayStation 5 physical copy); $60 (PlayStation5 digital; Steam )
Reviewed on PlayStation 5; available on PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series X/S and PC (Windows).
Cricket 26 is exactly what it says on the box: it’s a cricket game for the current season.
When I played the last entry in the series, Cricket 24 , I was pleasantly surprised by engaging gameplay and a fully licensed Pakistan national team with (mostly) accurate player likenesses.
I’d seen this year’s entry on the shelves, so I figured I’d review it, and with the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup in its final phases, there really wasn’t a better time to do so.
Cricket 26 is an all-around solid game, with engaging gameplay, visuals of a relatively high quality and many game modes and tournaments to play, along with other content. I will note that it’s targeted at hardcore cricket fans, so casual viewers of the game might struggle with it slightly.
In terms of presentation, Cricket 26 does a decent job of capturing the gentleman’s game. Players are well-animated, with very lifelike movements when batting and bowling. This is especially apparent with bowlers, where their unique actions offer some visual variety.
It’s also very satisfying to play; batting feels responsive and hard-hitting, particularly when you nail the timing and footwork and select the right shot for the delivery. You’ll be hitting massive sixes in Cricket 26 , and you’ll have fun doing it. Until you’re caught out anyway.
Bowling also feels good, with a variety of different deliveries across both pace and spin. You have a great deal of control over how you bowl, being able to select length, placement and the style of delivery. It opens the door for experimenting and watching batters draw the ball onto the stumps, which can be achieved (I’ve found) by manipulating swing deliveries.
Uprooting the stumps in particular had me standing up and cheering. Even near misses had me lean forward, like I would during an actual match.
I really like the core gameplay loop here; it deserves high marks.
The feature I spent the most time with in Cricket 26 was the career mode. Here, you can either pursue the journey of an existing player or create a new player with a reasonable character creator. I chose the latter, creating a self-insert of myself that can actually play cricket.
Behold this absolute specimen. From the streets of Karachi, wreaking havoc with ball and bat.
The mode starts you off at the club level, playing limited overs and first-class matches against teams in your player’s hometown. You can choose to only play as your created cricketer, or as the entire team. For the sake of saving time, I chose the latter, where you skip to when your player is at the crease or when they’re bowling.
While playing, you need to complete certain objectives every match, such as taking a certain number of wickets, to ensure you are selected for the team. Failing these means you will be benched for forthcoming matches.
Alongside gaining skill in bowling, batting and fielding, meeting goals also opens the door for being selected at the international level and playing for leagues like the PSL.
It’s a clear and simple line of progression, but you get the feel that you’re advancing your player from hometown hero to international superstar. As you play better, your player becomes better in terms of their stats. It’s a true rise to glory and easily my favourite part of this package.
The (second) biggest clash in cricket
Being the official game of the Ashes, we have to see how good the dedicated Ashes mode is. I decided to pick England.
A nice touch is that there’s a pre-match press conference addressed by your captain. It’s completely superficial — there are no voices, and both the captain and reporters move their mouths before questions are answered but I enjoy it, however creepy it may be.
There’s also a little video hype package before the match starts, with quick-cut clips of the game’s English and Australian players and dramatic music in the background, like what would precede a real televised match. It adds to the immersion of playing in one of the biggest contests in the history of cricket.
However, the gameplay is the same as any other mode. The fact that you’re playing in the Ashes is largely surface-level, with cutscenes and interactive press conferences giving the illusion of something far greater than it is.
Aside from the Ashes, there’s plenty of other modes here, including Centurion. You take a player-created team and compete with 99 others to score as many runs as possible. The 25 lowest-scoring teams are eliminated after each over.
This was really intense as I not only needed to keep the scoreboard ticking over, but also not succumb to pressure and play risky shots that would end up being caught. It’s a solid addition.
Like Cricket 24 before it, this entry features a fully licensed Pakistan team and PSL, with pretty accurate player likenesses, such as these of Shadab Khan and Shaheen Shah Afridi.
There are also other competitions like England’s Hundred, Australia’s KFC Big Bash and the Indian Premier League (IPL), although that last one isn’t what you’d expect
The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is not in the game — the default India team is a mishmash of fictional character models, uniforms and player names. Yet the IPL is presented with accurate team names, player rosters and uniforms.
I wanted to recreate Pakistan’s clash with India in Colombo during this year’s T20 World Cup and ensure we played competent cricket. Fortunately, the game’s community of players recreated India’s national team, which I downloaded to make sure the lineups were as accurate as possible.
Pakistan lost in my game, but that’s besides the point.
This really goes to show that the game has a passionate community, and they are willing to step in when the developers can’t. I respect that.
There are decent tutorials for batting and pace and spin bowling, but there’s no tutorial for fielding. I had to figure that out while playing the game. Learning by playing isn’t inherently a bad thing, but it is when you aren’t even told the basics or don’t have a control scheme.
Fielding is largely based on quick-time events (QTE) — where you have to time button presses based on the prompt on your screen — to throw the ball to either end of the pitch or perform a catch.
Catches work well: when the camera angle changes to your fielder, you have to move the left stick into a circle on screen and hit the corresponding button prompt to successfully nail the catch.
But you’re never told how to throw the ball to which end of the pitch, or how to throw it at the stumps directly. You just have to hit buttons and hope for the best.
I haven’t played Cricket 24 in a good while, but I remember a lack of tutorialisation for some of the game’s key mechanics, especially the fielding. I guess Big Ant Studios didn’t learn its lesson.
Annoyingly, Cricket 26 has some pretty major bugs that threw me off and shattered the experience. Most are linked to the animations and can be immersion-shattering comedy gold.
But others are far more egregious. I experienced a game-breaking bug while bowling. If the batter hit the ball and it came down the pitch, the bowler would not move to pick it up. Pushing the sticks did nothing, and they were just frozen in place, even as the batters ran between the wickets.
This was extremely frustrating since I liked bowling. Seeing my bowler standing in the open while being unable to move him — with the ball a few inches away — really affected my experience. But this wasn’t restricted to the bowlers; several fielders suffered from the same bug, standing frozen as the ball moved to the boundary.
Scoring a game like this is hard, since it’s a sports game which appeals to everyone at a base level, but only hardcore cricket fans will get the most out of Cricket 26 .
I can definitely recommend playing this game; it’s got plenty of content, a solid gameplay loop and a really good career mode for your money. It’s fun and fulfils the fantasy of being a cricket superstar. But it’s definitely designed for hardcore players, as it’s more of a simulation than a casual experience.
I enjoyed my time playing this, though I’d recommend getting it if you can find it on sale or if it’s cheap.
