Wrote a more detailed review:
It is often requested at the Sports Interactive forums that the makers of Football (formerly Championship) Manager would expand the sports their games cover. It is also often that a game is promoted as the "CM of [sport]".
Cricket Coach 2007 is clearly an attempt to fill that role, with only the relatively limited International Cricket Captain - restricted to a single domestic competition and failing to step forward in the last decade - as its competition. Unfortunately, it is let down by some baffling decisions and sloppy programming, making it hard to justify a purchase.
Superficially, Cricket Coach does indeed resemble the mighty soccer sims. It has an extensive database, with relatively few glaring errors. Any first class and international side is playable. The graphics bear passing resemblance to the moving circles used in FM, though really they date back to the old Cricket World Cup game of the early 1990s. While exceptionally outdated, cricket graphics really don't need to show more than where the fielders are and where the ball is going. The game does not handle height well, with balls seeming to fly to impossible heights even off the pads, and shots also have an odd habit of swinging through the air. The major annoyance is that while there is a speed control for highlights, it seems to have little effect. Instead, the same setting can result in highlights from lightning-fast to crawlingly slow, depending on the choices of what are shown as highlights.
The game would always live or die by its gameplay. The match simulations themselves are not too bad. Scores are generally reasonably realistic and results not obviously bizarre. There are a handful of missing features, such as the ability to have a batsman control the strike, and one wonders if the vast array of bowling options really have any effect. Sure, you could develop an elabourate plan, but will it make any difference?
Glaring omissions are obvious in the match section. There are no run outs or stumpings. There are no byes or leg byes. Batsmen don't score off no balls. Wicket-keepers are immediately rendered all but irrelevant. Catches rarely go to them anyway, and even world class ones seem to drop far more than they should. Fielding skills are rendered purely cosmetic, removing one major advantage the game may have had over ICC. The computer apparently cannot plan its overs, and winds up with bit-part bowlers in the final over.
Outside the games, there are plenty of problems as well. Despite a supposed patch fix, centrally-contracted players can often be absent from every state game even if they never play for their national side. There is no indication of how players perform outside the senior team, and no apparent way to influence development. Contract demands are often bizarre, with top-line players requesting minimal fees (eg. England international Cook joining Victoria for $10,000). Simulations are slow and unrealistic - the Australian Sheffield Shield (which has not had that name for several years) generally features barely a third of games finishing with outright wins. In one game, the competition leader won two of ten games. The game does not seem to handle these games at all well - every record for closest First Class finish is quickly broken in a few seasons. Speaking of records, these are rapidly mangled with the side that supposedly breaks the record not one of the sides listed as playing in the game. There is no way to skip ahead to your next game, though there is nothing to do in between. An Indian competition which ended with all sides having draws somehow wound up with New South Wales winning it. Navigation is made quite awkward by back buttons that don't actually take you back to your last screen.
Perhaps the most startling bug is seeing your international side, in the middle of a Test, have ODIs scheduled. Through some astoundingly sloppy programming, you can actually play two different games on the same day - apparently for no fatigue effect on players. One would have thought this would be the first thing that one would ensure wouldn't happen when dealing with fixtures, yet it does - in a patched version, no less.
Ultimately, the game is slow, buggy and remarkably shallow for what purports to be a management game. The management is greatly weakened by the total inability to develop players, and the irritating, arbitrary limit of 30 years play is just pointless and unnecessary. It fails to get right a lot of things that games managed over 15 years ago - MacCricket in particular in terms of the match engine. Sadly enough, with ICC still stagnating, it looks like we will be waiting a long time for a quality cricket management game.
