Blood Bowl review pt. 2

If you stick with Blood Bowl, though, the gameplay is incredibly complex and requires an immense amount of strategy in order to win matches. Knowing the risks of making certain calls, knowing when and where to move certain players or knowing how much damage your team can take is all integral to achieving victory. Blood Bowl is very much a thinker's game, and assuming you don't mind investing the time to learn the rules, craft a well rounded team and formulate effective tactics, it can be a surprisingly fun and rewarding experience.

Alternately, there's also a real-time mode in Blood Bowl that allows you to play football like a normal real-time strategy game. The game runs without pause (unless you intentionally pause the action to survey the field), giving matches a more dynamic, fast-paced, realistic feel. However, while games like Baldur's Gate can pull off running in real time while invisible dices roll in the background, Blood Bowl really can't. It was designed to be played as a turn-based, strategy game, and that's where you'll have the most fun.

Blood Bowl is a pretty decent looking game. The graphics themselves aren't all that spectacular, but the character designs are creative, the animations are smooth and the frame rate is stable. The play by play commentating, though, gets old very quickly. The banter and quips are amusing for a little while, but considering how Blood Bowl isn't a real sport, it's pretty irrelevant.

Blood Bowl also supports online multiplayer. The community is pretty small and it takes a little while to find matches. Still, if you can find a good number of players who actually know the rules and how to play, games are just as much fun online as they are offline. Additionally, there is downloadable content planned for the future, including new races.

Final Verdict

How much you'll enjoy Blood Bowl is entirely dependent on whether or not you're willing to learn how to play the game. If you're already intimate with the Living Rulebook 5.0’s rule set, great. Blood Bowl is both a terrific recreation of the board game and a solid strategy, sports game. If you have no clue what that is, though, think long and hard before dropping $50 on Blood Bowl.

Blood Bowl is a very hard game to learn, and even once you get a grasp for its rules and complex gameplay mechanics, the computer is so devious and cheap that livid frustration is often one poor dice roll away.

However, once you've invested the time to assemble your team and perfect your tactics, Blood Bowl becomes a lot more manageable and a lot more gratifying. If (and admittedly this is a big if) you can get past Blood Bowl's learning curve, a competent, strategy game awaits that will greatly please role-playing and tabletop gamers alike.

Blood Bowl is developed by Cyanide Studios and published by South Peak Interactive. The version reviewed was for Xbox 360 and it is available for Xbox 360 and PC today.

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