Big Cup Cricket -A quirky take on the traditional bat-and-ball game!

I’m not in the minority of people who consider Cricket a legitimate sport. My belief is support by the fact that the Cricket World Cup consists of only 10 countries, all of which were once part of the British Empire (as if it wasn’t bad enough that we forced this sport onto large parts of the world, we’re not even that good at it). Thankfully, while Big Cup Cricket is clearly a Cricket game, it’s a Japanese Cricket game, which slightly distances it from the dreariness of the real thing.

Big Cup Cricket doesn’t try to look realistic, and that works in its favour. The graphics are very ‘Super Nintendo’ and the England team even wear blue-and-red-overall outfits a la Super Mario.I instantly felt more endeared to this take on the national team than their real-life counterparts and for the first time in my life felt willing to get involved in this trivial Imperial pastime.

Big Cup Cricketmakes good use of the touch-screen in terms of bowling and batting. The amount of training drills (and the time it took me to complete them) reveals a steep learning curve to get proficient with the game. Bowling is affected by timing and the speed and curve with which you swipe the screen, while batting is completely responsive to the direction and power you swipe the ball with. Fielding isn’t quite so refined, as it’s often difficult to judge exactly where the ball is in relation to your Super Mario fielder; maybe it just takes practice, but having not grasped it after 15 minutes I decided that that’s too much time to dedicate to an iPhone Cricket game.

Aside from training drills, you can play individual matches or participate in the ‘Big Cup Contest’, where you play for the lucrative Challenge, Power, or Elite Cups, depending on your skill level. These options however seem a bit basic and the game coulduse a Challenge mode to offer some variety from the lengthy matches. The 15-minute matches (or longer) are a bit heavy-going for meand I’d appreciate a mode from which you could come away satisfied after dipping into the game for a couple of minutes.

The fact that Big Cup Cricket has a casual appearance and intuitive gameplay means that I don’t despise it like I do actual Cricket. However, itis still plagued by drawn-out, stop-start gameplay and a strange scoring system which make it is too similar to Cricket for me to really enjoy it. From a less prejudiced standpoint, Big Cup Cricket offers too few options considering how versatile its gameplay is, which means it’ll appeal mainly to those prepared to get stuck in for an intense old game of handheld Cricket. I’m not one of those people.