Nazara Games already have their hands full with a number of games and to it they have added a new title Cricket Premier League (CPL), a second screen experience where you play a 2D cricket match on your mobile phone and predict how would the proceedings of the match on that particular day turn out.
“Cricket Premier League is a real cricket simulation game, the idea is that when someone is a fan of cricket and is watching the match, CPL will give you an experience to play the match in the virtual world and score number of runs you think the team will score in the real match,” says Nazara Games, CEO, Manish Agarwal.
Cricket Premier League dwells into the real simulation zone where it requires users to be deeply engaged with a game of cricket they are viewing. Here you are not only playing the game on your mobile but keeping an eye about the developments in the real game. For a particular match you choose your team and select your playing 11 and then jump on to number of overs that you’d like to play.
Once you start playing, you need to submit the score before the match starts and the number of attempts can be as many as you like.
You have to constantly keep a watch at the score you submitted and the actual score being put on the board in the cricket match in order to figure out how close you get to that score. There are a number of elements that help you earn points and climb the leaderboard.
Challenge right now for Nazara is that the game is currently completely online and one has to be connected to the internet all the time while playing. “We have received a lot of feedback to create an offline version of the game, since net connectivity is still an issue in India and we are working on introducing an offline mode soon,” says Manish.
Also, won’t a user want to just go all guns blazing at a virtual bowler and thrash him rather than think about the real life happenings of the game?
Manish explains, “In CPL, it is an element of thinking and strategy than just normal cricket gameplay. You have to predict what will be the playing 11 for the particular match, the opening pair, the next set of batsmen and number of runs scored in the given overs. You can even play and submit scores when the match is live just for the last three overs and focus on analysing how the match is being played out.”
You can play as many times as you want but there is a cut-off time before you can submit the score. And, from the number of attempts you can select the one you think will possible be played in the real match.
Nazara recently have been on investing spree and have invested in London based TrulySocial and Banglore based MasterMind Sports. Apart from this, it also has a number of titles lined up with comic book house ACK, Bollywood star Hrithik Roshan and cricketer Virat Kohli.