Do you remember last year I did a review about an MMO based on the Warhammer franchise from Games Workshop?  Of course you do.  Well, the bright boys at Games Workshop didn’t just limit themselves to fantasy war gaming.  They branched out years ago to fantasy American Football miniature gaming as well.
And in 1987 thus was born Blood Bowl. 

Blood Bowl is loosely based on American Football that takes the roughness of that game to a brutal level.   The rules actively encourage maiming, wounding, and “killing” opposing team members within the context of the game.  If you’re sensitive and get your feelings hurt easily, then Blood Bowl isn’t the game for you.

There is a long list of things you don’t know about me.  I am going to cross one of those things off that list.  Back in the day when I lived in the Dallas/Fort Worth area I played in a Blood Bowl league.    I was moderately successful, usually placing in the top 5 teams during league plan.  My strategy?  I routinely targeted highly developed team members for death so I would be better able to control the game with my team.   Why didn’t I usually win the whole league?   Because the other 4 guys were better at killing than I was.  I liked to score points too.

True Story: back in my league days I would go out of my way to terminate Griff Oberwald, the human star player (an NPC you can purchase like a free-agent in today’s football).  I can’t stand that guy.  There was one game where I had bribed the ref ahead of time (allowing fouls to be thrown at will) and gathered my whole team around Griff to keep him on the ground and fouling him until I got a maimed or dead result.    Yes, the game allows you to cheat like that.

Like I said, not a game for the easily offended.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, “Abraxas, with all these cool games I need to play how am I going to have time to purchase and paint my own Blood Bowl team?”

Well, I have some good news for you. The good news is here’s a video game for that.  Last year Cyanide Studios developed and released Blood Bowl for the PC.  This is actually the  second Blood Bowl game developed for the PC.  The first abysmal effort was released in 1995 by MicroLeague.  It should have been shot on sight.

Recently Cyanide Studios ported the PC version from 2009 to the Xbox.  And after having extensively played both versions of the game on the Xbox and PC I can tell you that it is infinitely superior to the 1995 release and significantly inferior to the board game.

Not So Random Fact: in 2004 Cyanide Studios produced Chaos League.  It was a fantasy turn based game based on American football that encouraged an ultra-violent game where you maimed, hurt, and possibly killed opposing team members.  Yeah, they got sued and now they’re working for Games Workshop.

So, anyway, Blood Bowl is riddle with minor software bugs, the tutorial is almost unplayable to a newcomer, extremely rough appearance, and the game AI actively cheats (and not in the way that’s encouraged in the rules either).

Oh, yeah, the game on the Xbox and PC can be played in the original turn
based style of the board game or in a faux real-time version.   The real-time version is so mired in the board game rules you’ll be pausing it so often you may as well play the turn-based version.

But, all that aside, the game could have been good.  No, really, it could have.  But the seemingly endless amount of minor flaws in this game rapidly make it unplayable.  Some teams I would play would have my player selection randomly changed.  The computer would swap out players I had chosen and substitute others for no apparent reason.  Often their places would be moved on the map just prior to kick off into random designs.  Other teams would lose entire turns, unable to make any move or interact with the game other than to say End Turn.  None of these bugs were consistent across teams, each one having their own unique plague.

The tutorial is a joke.  It starts out with the assumption you know how the board game works and teaches you the differences in the video game.  Which is fine, if there was an option for someone to start at the ground up who’d never played the board game.  But since there isn’t that option, you’re stuck learning the finer points of the game on the fly.  That’s bad form, Cyanide.  Bad form!
One of the great  disappointments of this game is the rough look.  If you saw it being played on a screen today, you would think this was a game from about 5 years ago re-released on the Xbox 360.  Shiny skin textures covered with rough looking fabrics that clip into each other on a constant basis give the whole game a very rushed or unfinished look.  It’s almost like Cyanide hurriedly re-skinned their Chaos League game and pumped this one out to avoid further damages from the court case.

In the lower echelons of the game, the dice rolls look pretty balanced.  But as you play through the campaign levels and your team gains in experience you’ll start to see that the dice rolls heavily favor the AI. Heavily.  As in cheats on an almost constant basis.  I have watched Dwarven teams, not known for their agility, dance in and through multiple tackle zones to pick up a ball and flit down to the end zone while Elvin throwers drop the ball 6 turns in a row.  Statistically speaking it could happen, but when things like this happen game after game after game you get a little sick of it.  Sure the AI is really there just to fill in until you learn the game and take it on-line, but damn does it have to be so blatant?

Overall, Cyanide did a fine job of importing the board game rules into a video game environment.  Like the board game, it’s really meant to be played against other people and not a computer AI.  However, the rough look, software glitches, and obnoxious cheating on the AI’s behalf makes the game a frustrating experience from beginning to when you rage-quit.

In my Un-Humble Opinion© you’re better off going to a local game shop, painting up a team, and joining a league of the board game.  Cyanide’s release slate has a 2011 Blood Bowl release that is supposed to address many of these issue and bring in a lot more of the classic Games Workshop fantasy races to play with and against.
We’ll see.