There’s nothing like a good game of cricket, right? Standing around in the sun all day hoping whoever is in bat doesn’t hit it your way and then standing at the stumps with your bat in hand, wincing as the bowler hurls an incredibly hard red blob at you. The more skilled of us obviously relish such a thing and go on to take numerous spectacular catches before lashing a quick-fire century, whilst the slight duffers out there would more than likely run away from the ball whenever it got near and follow it up by getting cleaned bowled first delivery, or toe-end the ball onto your foot and watch it roll back onto the stumps. Not that such a thing would happen to me, of course. Nope, wouldn’t catch me doing those kinds of things.

Comedy mishaps aside, cricket is a tough, exacting sport where concentration levels need to be high. Cricket games, on the other hand, have always been a bit of a mixed bag, with bowling sweet spots, dodgy fielding and rather inept batting all turning up in various titles to spoil the party. The best attempt at the genre so far was undoubtedly the Brian Lara Cricket released back in the days of the original PlayStation, and it’s no doubt with much anticipation that series fans and cricket lovers alike have been waiting for this latest instalment in the series to be released.

So, what have we got to tinker around with? Well, we’ve got a selection of test nations such as England, South Africa, Zimbabwe and the West Indies, a smattering of game modes to pit themselves against each other and an option to unlock classic games from the past to relive. In terms of match modes we are given the option of a one-day event, a test match or a full-blown tour that sees you taking your chosen team through a series of one-day and test match events against another. There’s also the ICC Cricket World Cup mode, and for bizarre licensing reasons this not only is the only mode in which you will get real player names and likenesses, but also seems to be based off a team sheet of about two years ago. Those of you wanting to slot Paul Collingwood into the middle of England’s ranks or use the explosive Kevin Pietersen are set for disappointment. Somewhat thankfully, the game does allow you to edit the fictional names outside the World Cup mode.

There’s also a superstar mode that sees you creating your own player and taking him through matches you play with his chosen country. Having carefully crafted myself and distributed the rather slim amount of skill points mostly on my batting, I plumped for playing for England and thereafter slotted myself into the line-up when given the option before each type of game. The first few innings I attempted where somewhat of a disaster but gradually a few good stints at the crease saw me obtaining new skill points to up my abilities. Whilst certainly a good idea for a game mode in that it gives players a recurrent thread of interest throughout the happenings out on the field, it would most definitely have benefited from a more in-depth stat tracker for your player so you could check his progression from rookie to megastar.

This is all fine and well, but how does the cricket itself play? Well, it’s a bit… middling, really. The strange thing about playing Brian Lara Cricket 2005 is that at no point do you really feel that the game has improved on the previous game, and in some areas it feels worse if anything. Take for example the batting. Codemasters have used a confidence metre that builds up for the batsmen and bowler, with good portions of play on each side giving the appropriate player. In theory this sounds all well and good, but problems soon crop up when you decide that you’d rather leave a particularly tricky delivery as a batsman and let it go through to the wicket keeper. Upon doing this your confidence metre will plummet, meaning that unless you play at every single ball you’ll never increase your batsman’s confidence. You could just about justify this in a one-day international setting, but having to jab and defend at each delivery in the course of a test match is completely unrealistic and goes against the slower, more careful nature of the 5-day game.

Other problems crop up in the way that you’re pretty much never given an easy single, with most shots either heading straight to the boundary or right at a fielder. That’s not to say that you’ll never find the need to run between the wickets, but more than often you’ll find yourself having a particularly hard time knocking the ball into space. On top of this, you can’t perform either a sweep or a reverse sweep, which restricts your choice of shot and means that you’ll have to play the majority of your shots forwards.

If the batting feels a little flat-footed and incomplete, the bowling and fielding is just as bad. The dreaded sweet spot returns, meaning that anyone bowling a full-length yorker at even the most skilled of batsmen will inevitably see the stumps scattered at some point. Playing on the hardest difficulty setting I managed to skittle South Africa for 72, and the initial joy of seeing Graeme Smith and Herschelle Gibbs trudging back to the pavilion after first-ball ducks was rather tempered by the fact that I could pretty much bowl the exact same line and length and get everyone out. It won’t work every ball and you will certainly have to concede a few runs now and again, but unless you are kind to the game and spice your bowling up a bit you’ll find things remarkably easy.

The fielding frustrates too, although it also provides a rather neat way of giving the player the ability to control whether his fielders catch chances or take run-out opportunities. As soon as the ball heads their way a bar pops up with a sliding marker, and stopping it in the middle will see the fielder in question perform his action perfectly. This means that taking diving catches in the slips actually becomes an instinctive and rather rewarding experience, and giving the player control of it keeps things more involved than if there was simply bowling over after over to do. This is overridden however by the sheer frustration of seeing every single return throw go to the wicket keeper even if there’s a run-out chance at the other end, and the general gormlessness of some fielders who choose to stand and watch the ball as it rolls past them.

It all makes for a maddening experience, and one that feels disjointed from real cricket. This isn’t helped by the players and umpires looking like nightmarish puppets at times, with batsmen playing shots that would require dislocation of various parts of their anatomy and fielders crouching as if they were actually frogs sitting on a lily. The whole graphical package lacks a sense of realism, and given what the current generation of consoles can clearly do it’s all a tad of a letdown. The audio side of things holds up pretty decently with David Gower and Jonathan Agnew amongst others giving their thoughts on proceedings, and although a little repetitive the commentary is somewhat enjoyable, especially when the chaps kick off into an anecdote in between crucial happenings.

It’s pretty safe to say that Brian Lara 2005 is a bit of a disappointment. The game seems to have not taken half the lessons learnt from the previous version and in some cases has even taken a bit of a step backwards, which is hard to stomach. There is fun to be had and those who are more patient and plain willing to forgive the rather rough edges for sheer sake of having a cricket game to play will probably happily bat their way through many an innings, but for everyone else with a passing interest in the game the whole things falls down rather like a classic England mid-order batting collapse.