However there's a greater responsibility to be placed in the opinion of a reviewer of a publication that can have a direct affect on the fortunes of developers and their work. In the pantheon of global sports translated into videogame form, cricket has long been a poor relation. A true PlayStation veteran, Sammy's covered the world of PS gaming for years, with an enormous Trophy count to prove it. Cricket 22 will have Pat Cummins and Meg Lanning — captains of Australia's men and women teams, respectively — on the cover.

A true next-generation effort that builds on the massive success of Cricket 19, Cricket 22 will deliver the most robust, substantial game of cricket that fans have ever seen. However, we didn’t fare much better in our second attempt with just two runs on the board before being clean bowled by Mitchell Starc. This is the first cricket game ever to be available on next-gen consoles, so obviously, there will be enhancements.The same goes for the bowling tutorials with James Anderson, as there does not appear to be much change in the way of controls for either discipline in the game. The artificial intelligence is set to easy by default, which makes batting in particular a bit too easy. Not saying this means that mini reviews are better, but there's definitely still a nuance and skill to writing them — in getting your points across as efficiently as possible. Replacing all can take a long time even if you have a fast connection (all men’s international teams will take around ten minutes on a 60mb/s connection) and there’s no way of pausing the download or downloading it in the background. The build-up to any match, which attempts to approximate TV coverage, is beset by visual glitches; there’s also no attempt to mirror, for example, the razzmatazz that takes place before and during a Hundred game, nor the quick blasts from DJs that accompany wickets falling.

Similarly, if the end result is a shallow game without much to talk about, then regardless of how much time was spent on it, there's no reason to provide a full review for it.This cricket sim is not a pretty or polished game, but it does at least get the basics right - and to a greater extent than any of its predecessors which, it seems, is as much as cricket fans can ask for these days. Or you can embark on Cricket 22's Career mode, which again follows on from where Cricket 19's equivalent left off, but has received some tweaks that mainly make it feel a bit more believable.