Stealth Cricket All-Stars Review

Stealth Cricket All-Stars

I saw this game on sale a while back for quite cheap at my local GameSlop, and seeing as I was a fan of both stealth games and cricket, I thought I'd give it a try. I really had no idea what to expect as the screenshots were merely plain looking  menus and the title screen which wasn't too eye-catching either. However, the name had intrigued me, somewhat amused me too, at the thought of cricket players skulking around the pitch attempting to be invisible, and I wasn't disappointed either.

The game starts off with the last intense over of the World Cup final. The cutscene, rendered in beautifully low-poly 3D depicts your team as it struggles against their opponent's volley of pace bowlers, but as the last ball bounces right in front of whoever the batsman may be (it's hard to tell as the face was little more than a smudge), they swing their bat to smack the ball across the boundary for a much needed four runs and thus winning the match.  But the game really starts when the seats empty out as fans and team members alike rush to the ground, essentially filling almost all of it. The grounds become a sea of colours as your team celebrates (depending on the country you chose, skin colours, uniforms and even the slang thrown around by fans can differ), but what's this? An anonymous cricket player is crawling across the pitch! Depending on the country chosen, a famous player from your team is chosen at random, having chosen Australia I was barely able to breathe after laughing for five whole minutes as the portly figure of Warnie rolled into view.

The controls were fairly simple, quite similar to those of a third-person game, seeing as it was, well, a game using a third-person perspective. The camera was actually handled quite well, though it happened too often that you would accidentally stare up, only to be blinded by the immensely bright lights that hovered above the stadium. The main objective of the game is to hunt down the trophy-holder (most likely the captain of your team) and to steal the trophy from his very hands, and to subsequently blend into the crowd before no-doubt selling it to some black-market business. There are many interesting gameplay mechanics in play here including certain abilities which can be deployed with each individual player having a unique tactic based on their country of origin, personality and...well, their figure, which meant larger characters like Warnie, had a hard time squeezing into tight spaces, such as between the skinny legs of a triumphant McGrath. However, Warnie does have the ability to roll, which is often useful when taking out people stealthily, or at least, the game's definition of stealthily which seems to be to steamroll fans as they make as loud a shriek as possible. I did try a few of the other characters, including Ricky Ponting, who as cricket fans would know, has a habit of chewing gum on the field, and as such has the ability to pop a pre-blown bubble in order to startle and thus paralyze by-standers within a certain radius for a few seconds, which I found quite useful during the process of snatching the trophy from the captain's hands.

This game, like many good stealth games gives you the choice of going lethal, or non-lethal. Being the pacifist that I am, I chose to steamroll fans rather than bore them to death with Warnie's usual meaningless banter. The AI was quite admirably smart, despite repeating their lines a few too many times. A certain fan who had a face strongly resembling a squashed meat pie had a tendency to cycle through three phrases, all of which un-surprisingly contained the words "beer", "pub" and "mate". I also felt the game to be a bit dated, seeing as many of the players on the teams were from the distant 2006-era (having glanced at the box, I can confirm that this game was indeed made in 2006). The game contained what was arguably a lengthy campaign, considering all the alternate endings that the game has to offer depending on your degree of success which can range from living it up in a big house with a fancy car from the 60s to ending up being sacked by the cricket board and being forced to busk outside primary schools in Frankston for a living. I did enjoy this game's sense of humour as it contained all the catchphrases we've come to love and repeat over the years, seconds before chugging down a large keg of beer and proceeding to fall unconscious as our mates dance and yell around our fallen bodies. This game brought back memories, good memories of the old times; stealth, deception  and of course, Warnie; in short, everything I remember being in cricket back in '06.

Those of you who aren't cricket fans may not appreciate this hidden gem, but I certainly did. It has a certain charm which only a game from the last decade could provide and if I had been in the business of games journalism back then, I would've surely given this great title at least a honorable mention. This is certainly a quality title which I look forward to playing in a year's time when the aspects of the game will be even more outdated, and who knows, perhaps the men of the next century will pick up this game and appreciate this accurate snapshot of what cricket used to be. Without further ado or praise, though it certainly deserves more than I have the time to give it, I score this game a 9.8 out of 10.