Review | Blood Bowl
Format: PC | Genre: Crazy, brutal sport | Publisher: THQ | Developer: Cyanide Studios | Release date: 18/09/09 | RRP: £34.99
By Phill Cameron
Licensed products are always tricky.
They can go the way of being an overly faithful recreation of the original concept, leaving obtuse rules and ideas that just don’t apply any more, and an experience marred by complexities and irrelevancies. Blood Bowl is not one of those games.
Or you can have something that’s just about heard of the original idea, ran with a misinformed opinion, ended up with something that really makes no sense when related to the license it’s using, but could be taken on it’s own merits. Blood Bowl is not one of those games.
Then you’ve got games that use the license as inspiration for something truly worthy but not derivative, delivering something that certainly feels like it should, but hasn’t allowed its origin’s limitations to hamper the experience. Again, Blood Bowl isn’t exactly one of these games.
Instead, it straddles all of these realities, never quite bringing itself fully away from the Games Workshop boardgame, but never really trying to. Blood Bowl is Warhammer’s interpretation of American football, with all the violence and spikes you’d expect. But, being a Games Workshop product, it’s a turn based-affair with a semi-complicated rules system. Cyanide have essentially just given it some graphical flair and allowed you to play it over the internet - and really, anything more from a Blood Bowl game would be unwanted and unnecessary.
It’s an easy game to hate. There are so many design flaws that could drive anyone up the wall, such as the ‘end turn’ button being so easily clicked at the top of the screen, without even an ‘are you sure?’ popping up. And the game never tells you when your opponent has finished setting up, and that it’s not time to kick, presenting you with a shot of your kicker fluffing the whole thing and punting the ball off pitch.
But it’s just as easy to love it. Once you get beyond one of the worst interfaces in existence, and actually get to playing a game, the tactics and thrill of it all become obvious. Establishing how best to use your strong players to block the enemy line so that your weaker, more agile players can slip through the cracks in their defences, or praying that when one of their players tries to break a tackle zone they trip and break their neck, brings forth the sort of thrill only degenerate gamblers experience on a regular basis.
//Place your bets
Blood Bowl is all about playing the odds. Each move you make is placing money on a horse race, trying to figure out whether it’s worth going for the long shot over the favourite, and in which order you should be placing your bets. It could go either way, at any time. Your star player who’s never missed a catch will miss this catch, or your Minotaur is going to knock himself out trying to take out that skink. All this has happened, and will happen, at some point.
Which is exactly what makes Blood Bowl so compelling. You prioritise, and try to figure out what you should do first; if you send a few more players to surround their ball carrier, when you blitz him you’re far more likely to make him stumble. But sending those players carries a risk in itself; they may have to break tackles and push themselves, all of which involves rolling dice, and all of which could end in a turnover.
The turnover rule is interesting. Any time you mess up somehow, your turn ends and the opposite team starts theirs. It means that whenever there’s a no-risk move, you have to do that first, if only because the first time you do something with any risk, sod’s law demands it fails, leaving you with a motionless mess of a team.
It also means you need to pay attention to the other coach’s moves. At any point, it could be your turn, so you have to be figuring out what you’re going to do at any given time. It’s chess with violence and a dangerous addiction to speed, leaving you with things going tits-up or golden at any point. Basically, if something bad could happen, it probably will over the course of a match.
And all of this is said without even going into what happens beyond the matches; every time your players do what they’re supposed to (agile players scoring touchdowns, strong players injuring the enemy team) they get star player points. Get enough and they’ll level up, allowing you to buy new skills and, in some cases, giving them mutations. It provides a strong incentive to stop the other team injuring and killing your players, because replacing them is more than just a dent in your bank account.
Cyanide also chose to include a ‘Blitz’ mode, which takes the game into the real-time world. But it’s messy. It seems to be more a fault with the way the game is played than the transition to real-time, but it would seem they’d have to reinvent the rules of Blood Bowl to make it anything less than a hectic free-for-all. The slow tactics of the turn-based game are exchanged for the sort of quick-fire twitch fest that just makes things frustrating and confusing.
It’s a hard one to call. Blood Bowl, for all it’s glaring faults, really is a diamond in the rough. Now that’s it’s gone retail, no longer at the absurd £40 downloadable price tag, it’s an easier purchase to make, but it’s still a slight risk. Like the game itself, you’ll have to work out the odds and make a call. Personally, I can’t get enough of running skinks down the side of the pitch as my Saurii brutalise the enemy front line. It doesn’t really get much better.
7/10
