Big Cup Cricket game for iPhone and Android

Cricket games have a mixed history. While football games are very popular, there's never been a cricket title good enough to really capture the imagination of a lot of people.

The EA Cricket series has been the best thing on offer in the past few years, but EA hasn't released a version for any recent consoles (the last version was EA Cricket 2007 for the Playstation 2 and PC). Before that there was the Graham Gooch/Brian Lara franchise back in the 1990s.

Big Cup Cricket, available now for iOS and Android devices, is more cartoony than its full-size cousins – it's more in the vein of the popular web-based Stick Cricket.

Players take on any team from around the world, although because Big Cup Cricket hasn't licensed the names from the ICC, the players all have comedy names rather than real ones.

It's necessary to bat, bowl and field to win a game, and as ever with cricket games, batting is easiest. It's not easy, however: the game is not very forgiving when it comes to timing, and much will depend on the sensitivity of your phone's touchscreen.

You swipe in a particular direction to hit the ball but it's important to swipe at exactly the right moment, with the right amount of power. Even on the iPhone on which we reviewed the game – with a very responsive screen – we found it hard to consistently swipe as required.

Bowling was even trickier – we found ourselves continually bowling no-balls and bizarre wides and found that it took a lot of practice to get to a point where other teams weren't simply racking up enormous scores against our bowling attacks. Fielding wasn't quite so hard.

Despite the learning curve, Big Cup Cricket was fun to play for a while. Ultimately, though, getting to the point of being good at it was too much like hard work.