Blood Bowl Review

Just wait until you see the Blood Bowl adaptation of "Any Given Sunday"

It’s a little hard to reconcile the realm of table games with video games sometimes.  People who play table games are quite often a patient bunch.  After all, once they’ve bought a game they’ve got to assemble it, pain-stakingly paint it and then find someone of a similar inclination to play against.  Video gamers, on the other hand, prefer the immediate thrill of jumping straight into the action, and then quitting the moment our minds start to wander.

Maybe because the play styles are so disparate explains the rather hot and cold experience of Cyanide Studio’s console adaptation of Games Workshop’s classic Blood Bowl.  Despite having all the elements to create a fun, exciting and entertaining title, it lacks harmony between it’s table game roots and it’s video game incarnation.

For those who haven’t had the pleasure of playing a game of Blood Bowl, the basic premise is that of an American Football game played out in a fantasy reality.  Set in the original Warhammer universe, teams come from several different races, including humans, orcs, elves, dwarves, etc.  While the aim of the game is still to field an 11 player team and get the ball into the end-zone, often a simpler way to victory is to just stomp the opposing team into the turf and then walk in a touchdown.

In fact if anything, it’s the preferred way.

If you’re not familiar with the rules, the game has a couple of easy tutorials for you to run through, but you’ll pick a lot of things up just by playing a few matches.  Even though you’ll spend most of your time in the stadium, a lot of the game depends on your team management between events, which allows you to trade and train players, improve your fan support and upgrade team members with armour and weapons.  Once you’re out on the green, Cyanide’s Blood Bowl offers two different styles of play: real-time and turn based.

Cheers, big beard!

Turn-based is how the game is intended to be played.  A match plays out in sixteen turns each side, with a half-time reset called after eight turns apiece.  Players use their turn to move their players, tackle opponents and generally attempt to get their hands on the ball.  If at any point a player is knocked down, or a ball fumbled, the turn immediately ends and it’s over to your opponent.

Now in order to gauge a players success at any of these actions, a series of dice rolls need to be made, and that’s where it all begins to go downhill as a video game.

I used to play table games, including the original Blood Bowl, and there are so many things that can be excused with physical dice rolls.  Every single action in Blood Bowl outside of regular movement demands a roll of the dice, and the resulting rolls are then modified by a player’s personal stats and skills.  All gamers are familiar with the concept, but for video gamers this is a part of the program that usually runs invisibly in the background to effect the gameplay.  Here, however, you can see every single roll, and something in the instantaneous nature of the result just doesn’t sit well in my head.

Players at an impass: who dares attempt to pick up the ball and fail first?

This is only too painfully illustrated when attempting to pick up a loose ball.  Video gamers aren’t exactly conditioned to deal with the idea that they can’t just pick up an object they can clearly see.  If the ball is lying on the ground, uncontested, gaining possession of it shouldn’t require anything more than occupying the same space.  Unfortunately (especially for the less agile races) before picking up the ball you have to make a fumble check, which over a table would mean rolling a dice and howling in disappointment if it landed on 1.  In game, on the other hand, you’ll just have the never-ending frustration of walking over to the ball and seeing it fall out of your hands.  Many … many times.

Fumbling, of course, also directly triggers the end of your turn, so even with the ball safely in your half of the stadium (right after kick-off, for example) you have to play a guessing game of not only your chances of succeeding on the touch line, but also in the simple act of picking up the ball in the first place.  All this is part of the strategy that Blood Bowl demands, of course, I just can’t help that think that plenty of console gamers like myself are going to feel equal levels of frustration towards the game mechanics.

Real-time is an entirely different kettle of fish, and a mode that I feel has probably been crowbarred in to appeal to the new generation of gamers.  It’s enjoyable, but on a console it’s absolutely chaotic.  Keeping tabs on your players is a difficult feat, and coordinating a play in real-time is close to futile.  Luckily you can shortly pause the action by entering Concentration Mode, and tee up a complete play from there, but apart from that it’s usually the first team to pick up the ball will run all the way to touchdown.

That's right, you've just been trolled

Between games you manage your team.  Sometimes players will suffer injuries on the field that can put them out of the following matches, or in worse case scenarios can leave them stone dead.  Using your game winnings and money earned from sponsorship (the details of which must be negotiated in a contract), you can hire extra team staff and adjust your team’s roster.  Before each match, you’re also given the opportunity to purchase “inducements”, which offer advantages anywhere between bribing a referee to look the other way at your more underhanded plays, to extra dice rolls to help out with those blasted fumbles.  You can also dope your own players, or bankroll drug testing on opposing players to attempt to stop them from playing.  And if you’re rolling in cash, you can hire the use of various Star Players, pre-rolled high-stat players who will only play for as long as you can afford them.

The visually are fairly basic, although the ability to be able to zoom down to grass level is quite cool (especially in the opening scrum).  Apart from that the visuals are more functional than anything else.  Each species has their own subset of animations to amuse you, but don’t expect a great deal by way of variety.

The game offers fully customisable multiplayer matches and tournaments via Xbox Live, but tell the truth I couldn’t find anybody online to try them out with.  Live’s servers were a ghost town, but given that Blood Bowl has yet to have it’s retail release in the States, this might not be such a surprising detail.  The Xbox 360 seems like such an out of place to find a game like this, as it’s unlikely to woo the action fans and not really appealing to the console strategy fans.  For my money, I’m almost sure that if die-hard Blood Bowlers were going to play the video game port, they’d be playing it on PC.  And if you’re considering buying Blood Bowl for it’s multiplayer aspect then I’d suggest you do the same.

The Verdict:

Pros: An honest port of a very enjoyable table game, so fans of the original will love it.  Blitz mode gives the player plenty to customise and enjoy on the management side of things.  Multiplayer mode is fantastic, but finding an opponent might be the difficult part.

Cons: The idea to leave actions completely to chance is something that’s been slowly taken away from most video gamers, and Blood Bowl brings it back full force.  Teeth gritting amongst people unfamiliar with the game is almost guaranteed.  Nothing stellar in the visual or audio departs.

Overall: In the end, I think I’m sitting on the wrong platform if I was looking to get the most enjoyment out of this game.  The PC version will undoubtably be the focus of any long-term fan action, and the new real-time mode is somewhat stilted due to it’s reliance on the controller and not a mouse.  That said, I actually enjoy the game itself quite a lot, even if I do have a few qualms with the mechanics.  It’s an opinion splitter, and that’s why it’s getting a 2.5 out of 5 from me.  A good game, but almost destined to languish on consoles.