Unfortunately, the animation is a little less impressive, due mostly to a lack of variety. The 'big guys' and star players on each team are especially great, and many are impressive sights. The various teams are all well-modeled, with the different player types in each race offering distinctive features that make them easy to tell apart. While I'd argue that the game's graphics aren't especially important to its success, it is an attractive title. Is it better to get the ball moving right at the start of a turn, putting the rest of the team in danger of losing their turns, or should the linemen reposition first, knowing that a single bad roll would leave all the riskier moves unmade, and possibly leave the opposing team with a straight shot to the end zone? Every turn of Blood Bowl is a high-stakes experience, providing the kind of white-knuckle thrills one normally doesn't associate with board game adaptations. This punishing ‘turnover' penalty serves to keep the game moving while also encouraging careful strategy.
If a roll is failed, it means an immediate end to a player's turn, no matter how many moves are left. Doing the math, a total playing time of two hours would be brisk for any board game, but Blood Bowl is never actually that long due to the brilliant 'turnover' rule-simply put, moving players around the pitch, attacking the opposing team and handling the ball all require dice rolls. Speaking of being on the field, each of the game's 'halves' are eight turns long, and each of those turns can last a maximum of four minutes. That's no small feat, and it's kept brisk and entertaining due to some great writing for the game's exposition fountains: Bob and Jim, the ogre and vampire commentators who keep players apprised of story developments taking place on and off the field. Where a new player might balk at the sheer volume of dice rolls the game is simulating, by showing them every one of the game's systems and explaining their importance as part of the gameplay, the devs have found a way to drill the fundamentals of a pretty complex boardgame in without resorting to tons of rule text and esoterica. Telling the story of a down-on-its-luck human team during a rebuilding year, the developers hold the players' hand through the first few matches, offering up a simplified version of the rules, while gradually layering in complexity at just the right pace. It's a little odd to single out a sports game's narrative for praise, but BB2 does an amazing job of using its single-player mode to teach the game to newbies.
It's the result of developers who knew they had a good thing on their hands and had trust that the product would sell itself.īlood Bowl 2 takes place in a bright, comedic offshoot of the otherwise fairly bleak Warhammer fantasy universe which posits that instead of endlessly warring with one another in gruesome battles, the forces of order and chaos play a football/rugby hybrid with a bogus beer company sponsoring the whole thing. From showing dice roll results onscreen to the delightful complexity of the league system, every choice made focuses solely on recreating the board game that inspired it with as much fealty as possible. WTF Wait, the color commentator is on my team now? How did that happen?Īt its core, what impresses me most about Blood Bowl is how much confidence the developers have in their source material. LOW Missing my receiver roll and losing the game-tying touchdown in the last turn. HIGH Rolling two red dice and making my opponent decide between 'knocked down' and ‘knocked down'.
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