As regular readers may know, I used to be somewhat of a fantasy geek, having spent my childhood reading Advanced Dungeons & Dragons manuals and painting tiny lead figures of dwarfs and goblins. The vast majority of this fantasy-related gumpf was created by Games Workshop, a UK based company responsible for a host of names including Warhammer, Dark Futures and Blood Bowl.
I would like to say that I’ve outgrown all this, and indeed I like to think I have, but every so often something comes along to remind me of my wasted childhood, and here is a prime example of that. The folk at THQ have now turned Blood Bowl into a video game, thus all the distant memories have come back to haunt me. I got quite excited when it came through the post, lost in a sea of nostalgia for days gone by. But being a video game, there are no tiny lead miniatures to paint here, so I disappointedly put my brushes away and set to work booting the console up.
From what I can remember, as a board game, Blood Bowl took a looong time to play. Loosely based upon the rules of American football (ok, very very loosely!), but in a fantasy setting, you could find yourself playing as a team of elves against orcs, or humans vs dwarfs. It was all good clean fun, albeit slightly long winded.
The video game version stays faithful to this, and is just as long winded. Tediously so, in fact. Because there are no dice to throw, the programmers have decided to incorporate virtual dice that are used to calculate anything from the strength of your tackle to throwing the ball. The problem is, you tend to fail at these fairly simple actions at a worrying rate. It even reaches stupid proportions where a miss throw of the dice means you can fail at picking up the ball!
There are two modes to play, once based upon the original rules, and one that is completely customisable, allowing you to change numerous aspects of the game. Having said that, none of the changes take away from the fact that we have a bit of a turkey here. Games are supposed to be enjoyable to play, right? Well not when it comes to Blood Bowl it would seem. It’s just such a … chore. Everything is so annoyingly niggingly tedious, games drag on and on, and just scoring a touchdown is a mission in itself.
The programmers assume you know the Blood Bowl rules from the offset, and whilst there are tutorials that can help teach you them, they are just as confusing as the rules they are trying to teach you. Hand on heart, even thought I love the concept of a Blood Bowl game, I just found this painful to play. I swear half the time the buttons I was pressing to carry out actions didn’t even work. Every play just seemed so random, and I never really felt in control of my team.
As for the graphics and sound? Both leave a huge scope for improvement. He play announcers just end up repeating themselves, thus becoming annoying after a few games, and the graphics look more akin to something you’d find on a Playstation One than the latest generation console.
If only this had been more free flowing, then it would be a completely different story. Blood Bowl could have been amazing considering the source material at hand, so it’s a crying shame it isn’t. I was hoping this would be along the lines of John Madden with goblins, but alas no, it wasn’t to be.
