.::Cricket 2002 Online::. THE ORIGINAL AND THE BEST CRICKET 2002 SITE

Developed By: HB-Studios ; EA Sports Australia

Official Website: http://www.easportscricket.com

Cricket 2002 was perhaps the most hyped up cricket game ever, but hyped up games rarely deliver. The same is the case for EA Sports Cricket 2002. The two biggest flaws of this game are -- innumerable bugs and the absence of many well-advertised features from the final product.

Presentation/Packaging -- 7/10

Like most EA Sports products, the presentation and packaging of the game is very good.The game shipped with a concise yet useful manual which details all the features of the game(both present and missing!) nicely.The ingame presentation is crisp and easy to use, but the menu music gets a little repetitive as there is only one tune.The game has a major flaw though, the keyboard configuration is not saved properly every time you quit the game and as such you have to re-configure the keys every time you stary playing*.That is very tiresome to say the least.Also, to play a two player game you MUST have a six button or more gamepad, as only one player can play with the keyboard!

Commentary/Sound Effects/Crowds -- 4/10

The commentary in this game is buggy,repetitive and boring!Plain and simple!Richie Benaud and Jim Maxwell hardly seem to pull you into the game with their moronic comments which are often wrong.The sound effects like the bat hitting the ball are okay but they could have been made much better.Sadly, the crowd sounds are really bad and shatter EA's claim of having captured 'authentic crowd sounds from every part of the world'. However, Some third party music,commentary and sounds can be downloaded here to spice up your gameplay experience.

Graphics -- 8/10

This game scores highly in the graphics department.Although the graphics are nowhere as good and crisp as in titles such as FIFA but they are the best in a cricket game yet, and we must take into consideration the tight budgets often allocated to cricket titles. The game requires a moderate to powerful machine to run properly and the graphics are quite good when its played on a high level computer with full screen antialising and trilinear filtering. Even this department has its bugs though, the skin textures are really messed up and EA has used generic faces for the lesser known players who are unrecognizable! Solution: Get new skin textures here and tons of new faces here.

Gameplay -- 6/10

Now we come to real thing -- gameplay. Unfortunately the gameplay of Cricket 2002 is average at best. Some improvements over previous titles are present like the batsman can charge the spinners( that is, he can come down the pitch to hit them). On the whole batting is quite enjoyable with both backfoot and frontfoot shots implemented fairly well but at the same time some really good shots such as the reverse sweep are missing. Bowling is pretty boring and especially so as the promised swing and seam for pace bowlers has not been implemented properly.It is doubtful that anyone would waste his time with the bowling for much long. An important bug is that the game is simply incompatible with certain keyboard configurations* and there is only one or two fully compatible keyboard configurations and you will have to play with them incase you want to try all the shots and types of deliveries present in the game. Solution: Get the Stroke Editor from our editors section to improve the exisiting shots in the game and also download the reverse sweep patch to install the reverse sweep in the game.

Overall -- 6.5/10 (not an average)

Overall, your experience with the game can range from average to good.This game's not really good and in the same way its not really bad. It has all the marks of an unfinished product(and that after EA delayed its release for months) and the many bugs really hinder the enjoyment this game provides(or could provide).

*You can see our Troubleshooting section for a solution to that problem.

Read our Troubleshooting section for solutions to common problems.