I live in England, where some people take cricket very seriously. I am not one of those people, which is perhaps why I had fun playing Cricket Through the Ages, a goofy physics-based game that uses only one button.
When first booting up the game, I was greeted by a sonorous narrator doing what sounded like a passable impression of David Attenborough. He informed me that 10,000 years ago humanity was on the brink of extinction… until cricket was invented. To be honest, the first few minutes of gameplay left me rather confused. I was given control of a dinosaur and invited to charge at a prehistoric human. Next, I was a mediaeval knight on horseback trying to impale a peasant holding a rock. The ragdoll physics and one-button control scheme meant that I was only vaguely in control of what was happening.
Eventually, the gameplay did evolve into something loosely resembling a game of cricket. And I do mean loosely. You’ll start off with a ball which you must bowl towards your opponent, who defends their wicket with a bat. Once you succeed in bowling them out (or they accidentally destroy their own wicket—a common occurrence) you’ll have a turn batting, scoring points if you can knock the ball off screen. You can also gain points by simply hitting your opponent over the head with your bat. Ducks will sometimes fly across the screen and can be dispatched with the bat for a bonus point. (For the sake of ducks everywhere, I hope this is not permitted in the real game of cricket.)
This is all silly, chaotic fun, but it would’ve grown stale quickly if the game hadn’t constantly thrown new elements into the mix. First of all, new balls and bats are introduced. You might find yourself trying to hit a tennis ball with a golf club. The weight and size of the different balls affects their flight through the air (fending off a bowling ball with a croquet mallet is no easy feat, I can tell you). The game also applies various random conditions that change up the movement physics. One moment you’ll be playing in slow motion, the next you and your opponent will both be drunk, leading to even more ludicrous ragdoll moments than before.
The graphics are bright, colourful, and very simple. All the elements in the game are depicted with simple shapes that lack detail but which fit the cartoonish vibe of the game. Overall, the look and sound reminded me of some of the oddball Flash games I played on the internet in the early 2000s.
I was surprised to discover that there are no fewer than eight game modes on offer here. ‘Ash’s World Cup’ is the mode that most resembles a real game of cricket. The other modes unlock one at a time and lead you through a campaign of sorts, in which the narrator purports to take us on a tour through the history of cricket. This campaign becomes deeply surreal, and feels like the history of cricket as it might have been told by Monty Python. The second world war is depicted as an evolution of cricket, with soldiers lobbing grenades at one another and trying to bat them back with rifles, which seems as good a metaphor for the futility of war as any. There’s also a mode called ‘The Games of Olympus’, which depicts a wide variety of Olympic sports using the same physics-based gameplay. The final mode is called Ultra Cricket, which brings together a lot of ideas from the previous seven modes into a climatic cricket match set in the far future.
Simple though it is, Cricket Through the Ages won me over with its stupendously silly gameplay and its commitment to telling a daft, nonsensical story about humanity’s obsession with throwing balls and whacking each other with big sticks. You’re not likely to spend a long time playing it—it took me about two hours to complete all eight game modes—but it is fun while it lasts. I’d recommend grabbing a buddy and playing a two player game, as walloping a friend over the head with a cricket bat never gets old.
