JUST BAT (VR CRICKET)

This game is pretty rubbish. The bowling action is really terrible and is also the same for every type of bowling. The wickets are TINY (don't even go above knee level for me), this also means that the bounce the ball gets is super low, which makes it pretty hard to hit anything. The hit power is also very inconsistent, some light taps go miles whereas some massive swings get nothing. Also there's no calls for wides, which means you lose a ball on the 5 over challenge for nothing when a wide is bowled. Overall its fine for a dollar, but if you want a good VR cricket experience you're better off buying Cricket Club VR or IB Cricket for a bit more cash.

Meh, good for the price.

I played this on the Oculus Rift with Touch controllers and there were no issues. So I'm in the USA and I know next to nothing about Cricket. Meaning, I know it looks like baseball, but other than that I have no idea what's going on in a cricket game. I was flummoxed by why the ball was going behind me even though I was hitting it straight on. Then I took a good look at my bat and realized I had it facing the wrong way.

I did hit some homeruns, but usually I was lucky to even hit the ball. Cricket definitely has a higher difficulty curve than baseball (even though I'm sure a 100 mph is harder to hit than anything in Cricket). The reason for the higher difficulty is because you have to guess at where the ball will bounce. You are hitting the ball after the pitcher bounces it off the ground and you have to notice the way it was pitched to be able to correctly guess where it's headed.

So a lot of the time I was whiffing completely. A lot of ground balls that hardly went anywhere. Don't even talk to me abut the scoring, I have no idea. The game is also very barebones and lackluster in the graphics department. Still, I had some moments of fun. And I learned something about cricket, it's way harder than it looks.

So should you spend $2.24 on this VR title? Depends on the type of person you are. Do you like trying out new things? Do you mind a lot of frustration until you're finally able to get the gist of the game? Then this is worth $2.24. Otherwise, just skip it all together.

Sale Price Rating 5/10

It seems like a fun game but I was a bit dissapointed with how difficult it seemed to hit the ball, the speed measurements do not feel accurate .. and I found a trick to hit sixes and fours on every ball by pausing the game mid-delivery.

Its quality. Few more options and polish will be great. Even the current form its well worth getting!

Really enjoying it so far. Intersted to see future updates. Id like to see scenarios added in it e.g. requiring a set number of runs with two wickets remaing.

Having more fun with this then king of spin

This game has the potential to be really good, but as others have mentioned, the developers appear to have the work ethic of a narcoleptic sloth.

While the batting is, at times, quite good, the ball will frequently pass right through your bat, and the distance hit often bears no resemblance whatsoever to the force involved. At times, a defensive shot will race across the boundary, or balloon out for a six.

The leaderboard hasn't worked for months, and the developers are fully aware of this. Sadly they would rather sit back and trouser the money rather than make even the most minor changes to their game.

This is essentially a product abandoned at beta stage. It isn't super expensive, but buying this is essentially funding the sort of slacker developer who spends most of the day lying in bed getting high, while casually flipping an upraised middle finger at their mug customers, in favour of actually doing some legitimate work to fix their buggy product, and providing consumers with a reasonable level of quality.

I have mixed feelings over this game, as underneath the bugs and janky implementation, there is the basis of something good. It's just a shame that the devs can't be arsed to finish what they started. If there is any justice in the afterlife, these indolent wasters will be stripped naked, tied to an oversized wicket, and will face an eternity of neverending fast deliveries from Curtly Ambrose, pre "one bouncer per over" rules.

Not recommended.

I am changing my review to positive after the long-awaited updates from the developer.

The presentation of "Just bat" is quite simple (for example, fielders are represented by assets which resemble punching bags), but the core mechanic which is simulating is actually really entertaining. The line, length and spin (where applicable) of the bowling is believable, you can play all manner of legitimate cricket shots and the ball generally responds as you would expect. It is quite difficult and demands appropriate shot selection.

There are two game modes - free play and a '5 over challenge'. The former allows you to select the type of bowling you wish to face (pace, leg spin, off spin) and allows you to select the speed of the delivery and where it pitches. The latter sees each over bowled by a different type of bowler, with the speed, line and length determined by the AI.

Despite having much simpler graphics than "the other" cricket game for the Vive, this is much more challenging an overall a much more realistic experience. If you want a cricket game to play in VR, this is the one to get.

It's totally unrefined, and very frustrating when you clearly hit the ball and it just goes through the bat!

I have worked out though that bat will make contact with ball if you follow it all the way onto the bat with the headset. In other words, if you don't 'see' it hit the bat, then it won't.

Happy to stump up a few bucks in the hope they will develop it into something playable, so it gets the thumbs up on potential only.

I recommend it only because I like batting and this allows for batting by the bucketful. But it is overpriced and very lazily done.

* No effort rendering of the sky, just a fixed shot of some clouds that never move
* No effort rendering of the trees on the sides
* No effort rendering of the fielders, who appear as blue blobs
* Game just kind of freezes after you play your shot, then unfreezes just as the bowler bowls new ball
* No real effort put into the grass/oval
* It appears that you cannot be bowled out or caught behind, well I haven't yet despite missing lots of balls and snicking lots too which go to the keeper
* No LBW mechanic, which probably would be hard to do anyway
* You have a helmet option, all it does is limit your view. But they put the helmet feature on the grip button on the side. So as you play, you tend to touch the grip button each time you hit the ball, and put the helmet on all the time. I was doing it nearly every ball and it is very annoying.
* Bowler is actually throwing, the arm is not overhead but almost horizontal

To the developers I wish you would address the finer details & give this game the polish that the price tag deserves. Either that or drop it to $2.99 which is what it is worth now.

Update 2: The devs are back on board and have fixed the main bugs that were present before. Its now such a better game, before there was alot of faults but they seem to have addressed those already. This is now the best cricket batting game available in VR. I hope the devs carry on improving it.

Update 1: Ive removed the positive rating and changed to a Negative rating, as developer is too lazy and since release has not even fixed a single thing. The biggest element of the game (Leaderboards) is broken and has never been able to update.

Finally a cricket game that i was waiting for a long time!

Its a little expensive for what is included so far, but im hoping the developers can continually update this game to make it much much better, hopefully making the high price worth it.

At the moment there is nothing else like it in VR, and ive always wanted to play cricket in VR so i was extemely excited to play this.

The game does require a lot of work though, batting work decently well but still does require a lot of work. At the moment i dont think you are taking into account the velocity of the bat when we are swinging and making contact, as ive seen sometimes that the ball flys off high even when we are not swinging hard and other times when we are swinging hard the ball doesnt go anywhere :)

If you could please add proper fielders, umpire, another batsmen down the wicket and a proper cricket mode which gives you 10 wickets and a choise of how many overs you want to play (with international team choice) that would be brilliant.

At the moment the CPU do bowl too many wide deliverys especially the spinners down the leg side and we dont get any score for it, plus most of these balls end up going down to the boundary as the wicket keeper doesnt move.

If you could please fix all these issues, get rid of the horrible music that keeps coming on and improve upon the batting physics then it will be one hell of a game and also make the price we payed worth it!

Thanks and i hope to see regular updates from you dev on this game :)

After being burned badly by the abomination that is King of Spin, I went into this game with significantly lowered expectations. The good news is that Just Bat blows KOS out of the water... the question is, does that make it a good game? The answer is Not Really, but it is still the only choice worth considering if you are interested in playing cricket in VR.

I've played at least a couple of decades worth of actual cricket, so I can't help but compare any VR experience to the real deal. The bowling in Just Bat is OK, there is not a lot of variation but you can track the ball out of the bowler's hand and attempt to play a sensible shot, both of which were impossible in KOS. However, the measure of a game based on batting, (especially one called "Just Bat") is how good the batting feels, and it's here where the game lets itself down.

Every so often it's possible to latch on to a ball and see it go roughly where you intended, and when this happens it actually feels pretty good. The trouble is these moments are the exception, not the rule. Mostly you're left wondering what happened as the ball goes straight through to the keeper after playing an orthodox forward defensive stroke to a straight medium pace delivery, or alternatively goes flying over the fence for six after attempting to play an off drive along the ground.

Pressing and holding the trigger after you have played a shot shows you where the ball contacted the bat, this is a nice feature. Unfortunately it also shows up just how inaccurate the physics of the game are. I lost count of how many times I played a straight drive, knowing I should have smacked the ball straight past the bowler, only to see it go through to the keeper, or dribble off into the slips. Sure enough, holding in the trigger showed that the ball had hit right in the middle of the blade.

Graphically this game is pretty spartan, the fielders look like sex toys and there is not much detail generally. The audio is serviceable, with music that you will want to (and, mercifully, can) turn off and basic sounds for events like when willow contacts leather or when you tap the bat on the turf.

There is not much actual game here, the best option is to attempt the "5 Over Challenge" where you face, unsurprisingly, 5 overs of bowling and try to maximise your score. If you make it through without getting out and have a high score you get your name on the Leaderboard. That is, pretty much, it.

At the end of the day, I don't care too much if the graphics and sound are naff, or even if the game options are lacking... all that would be forgivable if only there was a good batting model that behaved the way you would expect in real life. I understand that this is not an easy task, but that's what is required to make a genuinely great cricket game. Just Bat, while light years ahead of King of Spin, does not have such a model, it's basically a cricket "game", it can't realistically be called a cricket "sim".

I'm still (a bit reluctantly) going to recommend this, mostly because it's currently best of breed (although that is not saying much) and is not a blatant overpriced ripoff POS like King of Spin. Also, on those odd occasions when a shot connected as expected, I can't deny that it felt pretty sweet, and I do sometimes find myself going back to it in spite of its shortcomings.

After playing both this and King of Spin VR, I'd recommend this with a few caveats:

1) Really needs a difficulty setting. You start first over with someone bowling at 60mph
2) Really needs indication of bowling change/bowling style change. The bowler model doesnt change and with no indication you go from a pace bowler to a spin bowler.
3) I am certain on faster bowling the ball went through my bat a few times.
4) Needs to be able to save setting between games. Having to turn off music each game is annoying.

This has more variety than King of Spin, and the ball physics do seem to be an improvement over Warnes game, but that game is more polished (the fielders in this game are cylinders, cmon man).

Both games are too expensive. This game does not look like a finished article, yet $12.99? (Why are all cricket VR games so expensive?)

I'm recommending this as I hope the dev continues development, puts in some difficulty setting and makes it easier to determine the type of bowler you are facing each ball.