Blood Bowl review
The name Games Workshop can elicit dreamy eyed memories of yesteryear for any aging gamer who ever owned a 20 sided die, and when it comes plastered onto a videogame disc you know the game itself is almost guaranteed to be niche market only.
Blood Bowl is no different. For the record, this was originally a turn-based board game in which two players commanded a team of fantasy based, Tolkein like sportsmen and played a game that was similar to American Football, only with a great deal more violence thrown in.
30 odd years later and it’s now a videogame (though back in the 90s there was a PC version, but we can ignore that one for now). Now you’d think that with the advancement in videogame technology we’d have moved on from turn-based sports simulation and embraced the world of modern gaming wholeheartedly. And you’d be thinking completely wrong. Almost.
There are two ways to play Blood Bowl: you can either plum for the original Classic version, which sees you controlling individual players, one at a time, within in a five minute bracket per turn (which means it can take half an hour before you’re anywhere near scoring a touchdown) or you can throw your dice into the pits of Hell and go for the high speed action of Real Time.
Any attempt to start playing Real Time straight away, without any knowledge of how the classic version works is sheer madness – this does not play like a FIFA of PES game. If you were to simply kick off and let the game run, you’d quickly be on the receiving end of a thrashing. No, what you’re supposed to do is command individual players across the entire playing field as quickly as possible, frantically trying to get the ball off the other team and score some points yourself. Something that is nigh on impossible in real time. Which is why they’ve added something called concentration mode, where you can pause the action, tell every player individually what you want him to do, and then start it all off again to see whether your commands/tactics have worked. And if you have no idea what you’re doing you’ll be switching concentration mode on every four seconds and changing your orders continuously in a futile attempt to stop the opposition advancing all the way up the pitch and taking the points. Real Time turns out to be a frustrating, frantic, irritating mess of a game that only the expert Blood Bowl players can make head or tail of.
Fact is you’re far better of sticking with the inordinately slower Classic mode. But don’t for one second think that because it’s turn based and nice and slow it’s any easier. For starters, you’re going to need to read through at least some of the strategy guide to get an idea of how to play the game properly – especially since the in-game tutorials are so meagre, explaining how to move and how to attack only, that they’re about as much help as socks for dolphins. The strategy guide weighs in at 80 pages long. 80 pages! And that’s nothing compared to the original rule book you are referred to for the full rules.
But here’s the very basic basics: It’s American Football, pretty much, two teams, one ball, two end zones. Get the ball to the end zone to score. You have five minutes to move your players around the pitch, which is set up as a grid of boxes, each box counting as one move allowance. Depending on their movement rating, each player can move a number of squares. Each player can only do one thing per turn, except one player who is allowed to do two things, like run and throw the ball, or attack an opponent and then run. So you have five minutes and one move per player. However if at any time you screw up – say you attack an opponent and lose the fight, a turnover occurs. Which means it’s the end of your go and the opposition now has a chance to move around the board.
By now, you may have got completely bored and stopped reading, and unless you are a fan of classic D&D role playing games, you’d be right to. Blood Bowl has nothing in it to make it accessible to inexperienced players. It’s certainly a good conversion of a board game to videogame, but do we really need that sort of thing? Did we need Monopoly in a videogame format? No doubt there will be gamers who loved the original board game and they will certainly love this videogame version – it still involves die rolling, statistics and preposterous lifeforms – but the fact is that the original game is probably better than this.
It’s got limited appeal written all over it, and as fun as it may be for the original board game players, for the rest of us it’s an over complex, pointless videogame that didn’t really need to be made and won’t even register on the majority of videogamers radars. If they ever consider making another version, they should really take a look at how football sims work and try to map those principals to this game, because the idea of giant trolls on an American Football pitch hammering the life out of elves is a great one, but the die rolling, your turn, my turn aspect of this game makes it a total turn off for everyone but the fans.
