	Blood Bowl
	Developer: Focus Home Interactive Publisher: Cyanide Release Date: Out Now Players: 1 or 2	Words By:
Blood Bowl is one of Games Workshop's less famous board game franchises, mainly as it’s based on a sport (American football) which is quite niche in the UK. Playing on a tabletop you move your team about to try and get the ball to the 'endzone' and score a touchdown, by almost any means necessary. Blood Bowl the video game creates a good aesthetic, somewhat limited by the clichéd representation of fantasy that GW portrays. You have the choice of a number of races to play with, from Humans to Orcs and even Skaven and the Elves. The graphics are serviceable but there is very little detail in the character models and the environments are fairly plain. The menus are quite clunky and slow to navigate, which makes getting through and understanding the game much tougher than it should have been. The game has tried to be faithful to the tabletop version by importing the entire rulebook. Each character has a list of attributes and skills and whenever you perform any action a number of calculations are automatically made, and called 'dice rolls'. You can see that this is a game of extreme stats as the running log of actions in the bottom of the screen rapidly scrolls through hundreds of calculations in a game. A simple game this isn't. The game is the least intuitive I've ever played and the tutorials do little to make the game any easier to understand. They race through quite unnatural gameplay elements as if they were explaining how to move with the analogue stick and give you no time to take in and digest everything that's being thrown at you. Even by re-watching every tutorial you will struggle to get to grips with just the basics. The game has two ways you can play-in 'real-time', which should play like a nerdy NFL game, or a turn-based version, which plays like a facsimile of the board game. The turn-based game is not for the first-time player, as it is very tough to get to grips with. As mentioned earlier any action you make is calculated and any time you fail a 'dice' roll your turn is automatically ended. This means you have to carefully plan your turns to do the most risky actions at the end to avoid being caught out. The game is apparently based on skill points combined with chance, but it seems chance accounts for 90% of what happens. Many times have I been turned over when my biggest bruiser was knocked over by the opponent's nimble receiver, or my runner failed three times to pick up the ball. Combine this with AI opponents who are unforgiving even on the easy setting and it makes for a frustrating and unrewarding experience. In real-time things are much faster and you have little time to react. But instead of being smoother and streamlined the game still feels clunky, calculated and controlling your characters is too complicated to make it more accessible for those who find the turn-based game slow and stale. What's strange is there is no option to strip down the rules and just make the game a fun arcade experience – the game clings uncompromisingly to the rulebook and sacrifices fun for faithfulness to the GW franchise. Unfortunately I feel that there is little here for even the most devout of Games Workshop fans, as although the turn-based game copies the elements of the board game almost completely on the console medium it just doesn't work. You have to wait and watch the computer make its pre-defined moves, which you can't skip, which removes one of the reasons why people play tabletop games - to interact with people. Blood Bowl could have been a solid game but it was never going to be a console success whilst clinging so tightly to the rules and stats of the board game, which stretches to hundreds of pages. The game feels heavy with all the rules, where it desperately needed to be easier, simpler and much more fluid.

Best Bits
- Good Fantasy Aesthetic
- Pretty Violent
- Lots of Races to Choose From

Worst Bits
- Too many rules
- Gameplay feels slow and clunky
- Unforgiving 'dice' rolls
- Annoying 'commentators'


by: Crazypunk