Blood Bowl is not your normal fantasy football. This is more of the Orcs vs. Elves vs. Humans type fantasy football. In it you take control of a team and try to guide them to victory over your opponents. If that entails killing the opponents on the field, well, so be it. Things happen and with a name like Blood Bowl, there’s bound to be some violence.
Unfortunately, the graphics are so generally low-quality that the violence doesn’t really feel like violence at all and the game is so difficult to play that it’s just not really all that much fun.
If a player attempts to do something and gets knocked down, your turn ends. If you fail to pick up the ball, your turn ends, if you fail to catch the ball, your turn ends. All of this adds up to a serious lack of fun in this title. Now I am old enough and have gamed long enough to have played the original tabletop game and that was by far, more fun than this game. In fact, if I had to classify this title in two words it would be something along the lines or frustratingly boring.
It’s almost impossible to accomplish anything in the game. When I did manage to do something I was shocked that it had worked. There are numerous things that happen that make no sense, a tiny human bowls over and practically kills an Orge who moved one square. It’s like every hit is a critical and your players are all but useless and can’t do even the simplest of basic moves.
The commentary is bland and repetitive and generally inaccurate. They’ll say things like ’they’re not far from the line now’ when in fact the other team just scored a touchdown. From the sounds of it they have about 5-10 lines that they recycle, and recycle far too often. The other sounds of the game are decent even though they too are rapidly recycled. The crowd is just background white noise as there is no interaction between them and the play on the field in general.
The player animations consist of what appear to be four moves - standing, running, fighting and lying on the ground twitching. None of them are spectacular and the combat and blood effects are just weak. The environmental graphics aren’t that bad at all actually and the character models are good.
The game does offer a lot of options and if you can get over the annoyingly bland commentary and the graphics you might even find a combination of rules that you like. The game offers both turn-based and real-time gameplay. In fact, many of you might like the real-time version far more than the turn-based as it plays quicker and has better flow and rhythm. It’s almost an entirely
different game.
In real-time games you can press B and go into concentration mode to give your men general directions like run that way, hit that guy, get the ball, etc. At the same time your opponent is doing the same so really it goes far quicker than the move one guy, have him get flattened, turnover, wait for opponent to move all players or get lucky and have them turnover to you.
Yet even with the real-time gameplay it’s just not very exciting or loads of fun like one would expect from a version of American football where you can pretty much get away with killing the other player. Is it worth the price? I don’t really think so, but you’ll need to make the call.
