The route to release of this computerised version of Blood Bowl has not been an smooth one.  Back in 2004 French developers Cyanide released an excellent PC game entitled Chaos League, which borrowed heavily from Games Workshop’s tabletop Blood Bowl game much to GW’s dismay.  Cyanide were threatened with court action over the matter, which they settled with an undisclosed amount of money as well as seeing the rights to CL transfer over to GW.  Games Workshop was obviously impressed with Cyanide’s work however as they kept the developer on board to make CL’s spiritual successor, Blood Bowl.

For those who are unaware exactly what Blood Bowl is, it is essentially a far more brutal version of American football based in GW’s expansive Warhammer fantasy world, featuring Orcs, Elves, Dwarfs, Lizards and more fantastic creatures beating the living daylights out of each other whilst occasionally taking the time to get the ball into the oppositions end zone.

Blood Bowl’s single player game is split into 3 modes, firstly a one-off exhibition mode which allows you to pick a team and get straight into the action, next up is the competition mode where you can play through any of the games pre-made tournaments as well as making your own custom ones and finally there is campaign mode, which is the meat of the single player game.  Campaign mode sees you create your team fr0m one of the 8 races in the game and play through competitions to earn money, prestige and experience to improve your players using the exact same rules as its tabletop counterpart, with the aim to become the no. 1 ranked team.

Multiplayer is where the game really comes into its own, with one off matches, tournaments and full blown leagues on offer. Even beginners can enjoy the online experience because even getting completely whitewashed doesn’t feel too bad if you manage to cause enough serious injuries on the opposing side, in fact it’s a little victory of its own.  My Orc team, Ghazgulz Rippaz, was thrashed 2-0 by Lizardmen in my first game, but the 2 deaths and 4 serious injuries I inflicted left me feeling quite satisfied.  If your friends are a little closer to home then there’s also a hot seat mode to really recreate that tabletop feel.

The game can be played in two distinctly different modes, classic and blitz, which offer wildly differing styles of play.  Classic takes the tabletop game and makes a perfect turn-based recreation on your computer, tackle zones, blocking dice, turnovers and all.  Blitz mode on the other hand is quite a different beast, first up the game is played in real time and gets quite frantic, you can pause the action at any time by pressing the space bar to allow you to dish out orders and change the default stances between defence, offence and neutral, but otherwise the game rolls on until the end of each 10 minute half.  As a hardened Blood Bowl fan I can’t help but think that the random elements of the game don’t translate well to the real-time game whilst the turn based game can get so tense that it has you sitting on the edge of your seat in the latter parts of the match.

Once you have the match interface is figured out the game is pretty simple and intuative, but the menu screens are a different matter.  There are lots of developers based in countries where English is not the first language, but I’ve seen very few games with this much broken English in the text, and whilst its amusing to start with, it gets old fast especially with the sheer volume of menus there are to navigate.  The voice acting for the game is great, even if the commentators do grate after a while, it’s more than made up for with the grunts, groans and stupid comments.

For the seasoned Blood Bowl fan the game really is the next best thing to playing the real game, in fact maybe better in many ways as you don’t have to fiddle around with models and a board for 2 hours, but for newcomers Blood Bowl may struggle to draw new fans to the franchise with it’s excessive menus and complex rules.  Fans of tactical gameplay should also give the game a chance, as they form the very core of limitless success against both the AI and real people.

7.5/10

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