Cricket Captain 2015

When I was in school, my math teachers always insisted we "show our work" - we had to demonstrate what steps we took to get from the base equation we had been given to the answer we came up with. I once got a 0/100 on an assignment because I didn't show my work. The teacher wrote the score on the page in front of me and scolded me in front of the entire class for it. Cricket Captain 2015 is very much in that same boat. The trick with most sports managment sims is, they demonstrate an athlete's abilities to the player through an attributes system; for instance, in Football Manager, Gonzalo Higuaín is better as a striker than Carlos Puyol not just because that is his natural position, but also because he has a much higher "Shooting" attribute, and probably several others that reflect his strengths. This is done to give the player a general guideline for whether he should expect success, failure, or something in between in a given matchup or scenario, even though it won't always work exactly the way the numbers dictate. Cricket Captain 2015 does not do this. There is not clear and present attribute system, merely a series of standard cricket statistics and nebulous "Form" and "Fitness" ratings. Yet, the Form rating is hardly perfect, because I frequently have players with one-star Form wildly outperforming players with three- or four-star Form, and Fitness doesn't have any effect at all that I've noticed or had explained to me. The manual explains that batsmen also have a fatigue rating during matches, but fatigue is only visible for bowlers, so you as captain don't know when to dial back the aggression on your batsmen and try to let them recover for another big push. Unless you just recognize the names of bowlers, you really have no idea who will be good and who won't until they've taken a couple of wickets, which doesn't reflect the intense scouting and scrutiny of high-level sports. The player is given little control over what his team does, which can lead to a lot of frustrating big overs for opposing bats and wickets lost for your own side. This is made all the more frustrating by the fact that there clearly is some sort of underlying attributes system that the player just isn't allowed to see. I get messages through my training sessions that players have improved certain attributes. What were those attributes before, and what are they now? Being able to see those things would allow me to adjust what I'm instructing my players in, so I know if I'm wasting my time trying to make a bowler more accurate or trying to make my young wicketkeeper a better fielder. Despite a manual that does offer a few useful tips, the developers don't seem to have taken into account that this could be someone's first deep exposure to cricket, as evidenced by the lack of a tutorial of any kind. I've logged almost four hours in this game and still don't quite know what everything does. A scripted T20 or ODI match to help players get a feel for how the game works and how the sport works. The game also lacks pretty much all forms of polish. I've had games where the field completely disappears and leaves the players standing on a black screen during highlights. There is no music of any kind. There's an option for menu sound, but there is no menu sound. These things are baseline in video games these days, so their absence is duly noted here. For all the flak I give this game, I don't think it's that far away from being pretty good. It just needs to do a better job of giving its players information about why things are happening the way they are. Overall, if you're a die-hard fan of cricket with $25 burning a hole in your pocket, that probably won't stop you from finding some measure of enjoyment from this game. Everyone else should hold off and see what the 2016 edition looks like.

Everything you want from a realistic cricket simulation... apart from one thing. You are only allowed to win once in a while by total random luck. No mattter how poor you opponent is or how great you are for the first 75% of the match, the simulation becomes a nonsense for the remainder of the game. The computer will score 200 runs for no wicket in the last session, or you will lose 8 wickets if you are batting. This game is not a simulation it is a script, and like most repetative stories it eventually becomes boring.

This is without a doubt the worst £20 I have ever spent in my life, bored after one t20 match,awful graphics, would have got more satisfaction by going outside & putting £20 down the drain!

Great game that any cricket fan would enjoy!

ultimate pile of horse **** and thats all you need to know about this sorry excuse of a game

I've played every Cricket Captain game since it's inception many years ago and I've thoroughly enjoyed the series. I probably don't need to get each edition as some have been nothing more than a databse update with a few minor additions, but this is clearly the best cricket management game on the market. Nothing comes close. So should you buy it? The short answer is yes. The three major leagues in England, India and Australia are all well covered and there are plenty of options to play both in and out of the game. You can be a hands on coach and play every ball, go a little less with every over or even sim through games you don't feel you need to play. It really is good stuff and you can get hours of enjoyment out of it. With a few seasons under my belt I've been able to build a very handy side in all three formats as the contract system works well. There are, however, a few things that need to be mentioned that haven't been fixed in years. 1. - There is no true way to see just how good a player is or the potential they have. The only way you can tell is at the end of the season when you sign their contract - if they ask for a higher amount (eg. above $50,000) then you can be assured you are generally getting a good player. However outside of this it's hit and miss. I've signed players for big bucks that have been a huge disappointement. Why? I don't really know. Adding in a system like this would be sensational and help decide the make up of your team better. 2. - There are some incosistencies with the AI. There seem to be far too many LBW's and often when you change a batsman's aggressiveness they can go out in the next over. The AI is generally pretty good but be prepared for the odd frustration here and there. 3. - The training system is only decent. There are plenty of options to choose from but there is no way to tell how well things are working. This ties into being able to see how good a player is or the potential of how good they CAN be with the right training. Fixing this would be excellent. Outside of those criticism's this is an excellent game and if you can sink some time into it you'll thoroughly enjoy it.

I’ve never played any of the previous games in this series, so my review is based solely on this game. If you’re a fan of cricket (and if you’re checking out the game, then I’d assume that’s a given) then it’s fun to pick real players to play in your games. You can also pick young up and coming players, and if they turn out to be good enough, you can watch them progress, hopefully into great players. Firstly, the UI looks dated. It really could do with an update. There’s relatively limited ways in which you can influence what’s going on during a match, so a lot of it is out of your hands. That in itself isn’t so bad, since that’s basically what happens with Football Manager. Probably the biggest problem I have with the game, though, is lack of information. There’s limited stats available to help you to make informed decisions. For example, there seems to be no way to judge which wicket keeper is better than any other, since there’s no actual wicket keeping stats available, not that I’ve ever found. You can assign trainers to players, but it’s extremely difficult to tell if it’s having any affect. In Football Manager, for instance, you can quite easily see what affect your trainer is having on the player, and whether you’re wasting your time trying to improve that area of the player. You also can’t hire and fire trainers, since they’re nameless and faceless. The game is fun, but really could be a lot more fun, and only if it undergoes a serious make-over, and it really does need one. If there’s a 2016 version of this game, and it still essentially looks and plays the same, then there’s no way I’d buy it. An updated player database wouldn’t be enough to make me put down the dollars.

I really enjoy being able to play fantasy test series using the all time great players, but I would very much like to see more South African players from the years that they were banned from Test cricket. I suppose that more all time greats, from all the test playing nations would be a good thing. Apart from my preferences, this is still the best cricket game I`ve seen,

Unless there are a lot of subtleties to Cricket that this game misses and I'm just unaware of, Cricket Captain 2015 deserves far better than a 'mixed' review level. I knew next to nothing about Cricket, but I do play a lot of sports management sims. I don't think there's a major game of that genre that I haven't played, and this seems like one of the better ones. The in-game graphics are outstanding for a management sim, just compare it to OOTP and FM. The management isn't as deep as those two games, of course, but it's good enough to satisfy me. What I really like about CC 2015 is the fog of war regarding players. You don't have visible attribute settings that tell you exactly how good a player is. You get told what his tendencies are and what his stats are, and you work out from there if he'll be a fit for you or not. If a player is performing crap, you think, well, is he just unlucky? Am I using him wrong? Or is he actually crap? The player attributes make most management games easy to win; this game on the other hand is a great challenge. In OOTP there are a sizable minority of us who play using 'stats only', where we turn attributes off and evaluate players based on performance. If you're an OOTP player who enjoys that style, you'll love this. I'm very happy with this purchase.

Another database update with very few additions , its a shame that its been nearly 2 decades they are selling the same game again and again.