Cricket 24

I came to Cricket 24 the same way I come to any niche sports sim: hoping the genre's sole real contender has finally closed the gap on the big-budget competition. Big Ant Studios has been the only team making proper cricket games for a decade, and Cricket 24 is their latest swing at the crease. The result is a game that is good enough to play, frustrating enough to notice all its missed chances, and familiar enough that anyone who already owns Cricket 22 will feel like they are watching a rerun. On the field, the batting system is the clearest reason to boot the game up. Adjusting your footwork, reading the delivery type, and timing the swing correctly produces a satisfying feedback loop that rewards practice. Bowling gives you a reasonable toolkit too: Cross Seams, Bouncers, varying release speeds, different jump styles. Working through a lineup with tactical field placement has moments of genuine tension. The problem is that batting responsiveness can feel arbitrary, especially once Career Mode's stat-dependent mechanics kick in. You might be carving through opposition in a quick match and then waffling identical shots in Career for no reason you can identify. That inconsistency chips away at trust in the core systems. The licensing haul is the headline addition and it is genuinely substantial. The Ashes, KFC Big Bash, Weber WBBL, The Hundred, the Caribbean Premier League, and a selection of Indian T20 franchise teams are all here, spread across more than 50 official stadiums. Over 300 players were captured through photogrammetry, and some of the top-tier faces hold up. The issue is the gaps undercut the spectacle. The Indian national team is not fully licensed, so one of cricket's most followed outfits is represented by placeholder names and generic faces. The promised Pro Team mode, which was marketed as something like an Ultimate Team card system, was silently dropped before launch with no explanation. What you get instead is Career Mode, which lets you build a player from club cricket up to international selection, specializing in T20 formats, Test cricket, or both. It has press conferences and training sessions and some story-driven cutscenes around The Ashes. It works. It just has not changed much from the previous entry. Online play is cross-platform between PC, Xbox, and PlayStation, which is a genuine positive and one of the few features that feels like forward motion. That said, early player reports flagged disconnection problems and instability in online sessions, which is exactly the kind of technical roughness that makes multiplayer feel like a gamble rather than a feature. The AI fielding is the other persistent sore point: fielders stall, stop inexplicably short of the ball, then conjure unrealistic run-outs in the same over. Commentary compounds it, calling the action out of sync with what is actually happening on screen. These are not new bugs. They carried over from Cricket 22. The Tower of Cricket mode, a tiered challenge system, adds some solo variety, and the Cricket Academy lets the community build and share custom players, teams, and stadiums across platforms, which has historically papered over official content gaps fairly well. If you own no prior Big Ant cricket game and you follow the sport seriously, Cricket 24 is a playable, fairly deep simulation with a respectable difficulty slider range and more licensed tournaments than anything else on PC. If you already have Cricket 22, the upgrade case is thin. The core batting and bowling loops are recognizable from two years ago, the technical issues are familiar, and the single genuinely new mode was scrapped. Big Ant has a track record of patching their games post-launch, and some of the rougher edges did get attention over time. But on current form, this is a lateral move dressed up as progress. Fred, Scout Team