Okay, so played two (rain affected) sessions of my first test match betwixt England and New Zealand batting and these are my thoughts...
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Very England vibez from this scorecard. Anyways...
- First of all commentary is LO focussed and dire and should be re-recorded, preferably when Mike Atherton has had a coffee. Gower the best of the rest and sounds natural. The other three sound like they are robots reading.
- Secondly... the lack of front foot offside defensive is terrible. Luckily you can play back-foot defensive even to full balls but if it's just outside off and yellow or blue your best bet is to play a straight drive or try and clip it atm which is poor. It's how poor Dan Lawrence was done by Wagner.
- Running isn't just backfoot shots, there is a slight delay even on front foot shots, it is quite noticeable and both that and the backfoot shots need to be tweaked in order to make the game more fluid. Many times I had Root forward, driving and then stutter stepping his way to starting to run costing me a second
- Also backfoot straight shots when I'm wanting to drive to Long-on are turning into pull shots too often and I am defoz playing straight.
- Too many overthrows from the AI. I've got about 20ish runs from them.
- I set the time of day for this test match to start at 11am when I started yesterday but when I've reloaded today it's got a 1pm start and is now a day/night test but I am still using the red ball.
- No time of day on the scorecard either which needs to come back please.
- Kyle Jamieson's nose. MY GOD.
Those things said there is a good game in here. Frustrations noted above aside I enjoyed these sessions of cricket, recovering from the collapse and getting into a groove with Root and Pope. The animations are much better and more fluid than C19 and it makes a big difference to the actual batting itself so people calling this a re-skin are underselling it if you ask me. The driving for example looks a lot, lot better. Obviously I haven't bowled yet and hopefully won't be soon but there is definitely a decent game in here and it has the potential to be much better than C19 but those egregious things noted above need to be sorted in order for that to happen.
ALSO ADD BACK TOUR MODE!