Anyway, the aim of the game is straightforward enough: guide a county or international side to cricketing glory, using all the man-management skills, tactical nous, and cricket knowledge you can muster. Amongst other things, you'll conduct training, sign the players, renew their contracts, tell the bowlers how to bowl, the batsmen how to bat, and the groundsman how to prepare the pitch for each game. On paper, this kind of thing should work a treat - after all, cricket is a tactically rich and diverse sport, while the Football Manager games offer a similar experience and can keep players hooked for playing sessions that last for several hours at a time. But as it happens, developer Empire Interactive hasn't quite pulled it off, instead producing an awkward air-shot of a game that lacks the detail and depth to be truly involving.
From an Australian perspective, things don't get off to the most promising of starts. While the Aussie national side is present and correct, the domestic Pura Cup has been snipped entirely, with the eighteen teams from the English County Championship the only domestic sides to have made the game. Each of these comes with a reasonably up-to-date roster, accompanied by all manner of numbers and statistics for every player (you don't have to go domestic, incidentally - the game also lets you pick an international side from the beginning, letting you play through a variety of World Tests and ODI championships). Choose the domestic route, and you'll immediately be charged with the task of acquiring new players, using a contract negotiation feature that's so hideously unrefined and devoid of detail we're still wondering why on earth it's been included. Just as rudimentary is the training system, where you're given a limited number of physio and practice sessions, and asked to dedicate them to the players who need training most. It's incredibly shallow.
Ian Bell, being useless for a change.
Thankfully, the attention to detail quickly ramps up once you get to play a match. During each match, you get to control a selection of variables, ranging from the aggression of your batsmen and bowlers, the line and length bowled by your bowlers, which of your batsmen should try and keep strike, how aggressive your field placings are, and so forth. As in the real sport, your choices need to be based on a number of factors - the weather, the bowling/batting preferences of players, the condition of the pitch, how bright it is, as well as a few others. Which all sounds great, and yes, the result is a pretty accurate approximation of cricket itself.
However - and this is a sizeable 'however', with twenty-foot high letters decked out in neon - it's difficult to escape the nagging feeling that your decisions just aren't affecting what's unfolding on your monitor. We did consider that this could be down to the nature of cricket - for example, good conditions for spin-bowling won't always mean a spin-bowler is guaranteed to get himself a deluge of wickets. But here, your decisions seem to carry even less consequence than in the real sport, to the point at which you're left feeling slightly out of control.
Still, matches are indisputably the strongest part of the package, and are surprisingly watchable, despite the truly crappy presentation. But you'll quickly learn to forgive the 1996-esque sprites (and 1996 is not an exaggeration) with their six frames of animation (there's not a polygon in sight) because, just like real cricket, it's simply fairly absorbing watching a Test match gradually unfold. And the graphical poverty of the package does at least mean virtually any PC built since the heyday of Don Bradman himself can run the thing, something we'd take over pointlessly pretty 3D models in this case.
It also helps that there's enough variety in the shots played - there's not too much repetition at all, and even the commentary (from the BBC's Jonathan Agnew) isn't half-bad. More than two crowd sound effects would have been nice, but earth-shattering audio is hardly necessary for any management title. There are other parts of the title that feel distinctly 'budget' - the slightly grim 800 x 600 maximum resolution for one, and also the way that every single player in the game (even the most famous blonde cricketers - Warne, Flintoff, Hoggard) has either black hair (if they originate from the sub-continent) or a reddish-brown hair (if they come from... anywhere else). Then again, this is a budget-priced title, so we'd advise leaving any expectations of a high-gloss, Football Manager-esque sim at the pavilion gate.
Shane Warne, there. With his famous, er, red hair.
But whereas authentic hair colour isn't a must for games like this, what every good management game does require is menus that are intelligently laid out, and sadly it's here that ICC 2006 yet again falls behind in comparison to other management games - frankly, the slick, intuitive layout of Football Manager's menu screens put this to shame. It's not that they're unusable - far from it - but the confusing spread of arrows and scroll bars that greet you on many pages and the lack of variety in the fonts used means you need to spend a good wedge of time just getting used to the idiosyncracies of a menu system that's been clumsily designed at best. Navigating your way around Football Manager was far easier from the beginning, despite the fact that its menus held a lot more information.
The final nail in ICC 2006's coffin is hammered in by the game's sheer instability. We spent a good 15-20 hours with the title on three different machines, and on all three, the game crashed an alarming number of times - certainly, a crash every other hour was quite usual. The lack of a quicksave feature (you have to save, then exit your game, then reload it) merely compounds this issue, and should result in Empire's valiant attempt at cricket strategy being relegated to the bargain bins. No. 1 selling cricket management series or not, it still doesn't deserve your money.
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