Some board games make excellent video games, some board games make average video games and some board games really shouldn’t bother.
There will have been a few of you standing on the sidelines, watching the development of Blood Bowl and hoping with everything crossed that it would turn out to be a gem, a word to the wise prepare yourselves for disappointment. There might be a Bowl in the title, but it’s not Super by any means.
I believe the key to my opening statement is whether the original game is actually good enough to survive the transformation to the screen, Carcassonne for example is an addictive and fun diversion. You get all the pleasure and strategy of the game, with none of the clearing up afterwards. After spending some time with Blood Bowl and forgiving it for it rough edges in terms of presentation I started to realize something, it’s the original gameplay that really turns you off, and that gameplay is as authentic as it can be.
If you didn’t grow up in reach of a Games Workshop you might not be familiar with the original game, Blood Bowl attempted to twist the Warhammer story and include a fantasy sport. Thus a watered down American football where your team were wide open to regular maiming and disfigurement was born. Utilizing the standard cocktail of Warhammer races the game tried to open up strategy and tactics that would suit any style of player, the game shipped with two teams of plastic figures, but of course the real money for Games Workshop was in the full roster of lead figures that had to be bought and painted.
Blood Bowl the videogame comes complete with colourful characters in all races, so no more painting and that’s a good thing; it also gives you a fair mix of game options choose from a turn based match or real time mode and a combination of campaign, one off matches or online matches to play.
The turn based option is more faithful to the board game in the way that it flows; however that game structure makes the experience ponderous and frustrating. As in any turn based strategy, you get to move your players one by one. If a player comes into contact with an enemy or has to carry out an action you have to clear a dice roll, fail the roll and your turn ends. The AI then seems to be able to take advantage of your failing and complete the majority of its turn before failing or running out of players. There is nothing more frustrating than planning a turn full of strategy only to be undone at the first opportunity, for example handing the ball to a player in the next square or passing within a square of an opposing player.
The real-time mode is fast and chaotic. Although you can use Blitz Mode to stop the action and give the players instructions you never really feel that you have control of them. Leave them to their own devices and they will inevitably end up in agony on the floor, try and move them productively and you will find the opposition in your end zone with the ball. It’s almost as if both modes should have been combined somehow because at the moment the traditional mode is horribly paced and the Blitz mode is far too full on. In both modes there are plenty of race based special moves to try out and before matches you have the opportunity to subvert the course of the game with bribes and/or magic interference, but it just doesn’t feel involved enough.
As far as presentation goes, the game screams ‘unfinished’ there is an obvious lack of polish in the presentation, the character models and arena look the part, but the details are where things begin to fall apart. The in-game screen is monstrously complicated, full of icons and some decidedly dodgy 8-bit fonts, there is so much information flying around that it soon becomes transparent and useless, not to mention the repetitive and jarring sound effects.
While I do not doubt that Cyanide made a big effort to make this game work, I feel they would have done a better job relaxing the brief and delivering the rose tinted version of Blood Bowl that we had in our minds instead of this purist version. The fact of the matter is that the original game did have flaws, could be frustrating to play and losing out on repeated dice rolls is never fun.
Give me the old Amiga game Brutal Sports Football any day, a left and right scroller where fantasy teams went toe to toe and by the end of the match the team with the least amount of decapitations won. The one thing that Blood Bowl has convinced me of is to stop wondering how good Games Workshop other classic board game Battle Cars would play online, I still have the board game, I will teach my son to play it and we will clear up after ourselves.
so, is it worth a rent?
Only if you have a human to play against for the night, and it won’t take long to find something else to play.
what a shame
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