Over the past few weeks I have been playing the recently released Blood Bowl game from Cyanide Studios. For those of you that aren’t aware Blood Bowl (BB) is a Games Workshop title that started life as a board game. Of all the GW titles I found Blood Bowl to be one of the more exciting envrionments they offered. I enjoyed playing the game thanks to the small amount of time needed to setup and play a match.
Based on the Warhammer fantasy universe the teams compete in a Ultra-violent sport similar in some ways to rugby and American football, teams of 11 players face off, attempting to score touchdowns and generally doing as much damage to the opposing team (of course without being sent off). The most common Warhammer world races can be found in the game and you can name, colour and brand your team to your liking, of course each race has their own strengths and weaknesses, which you’ll need to learn and play to in-order to
The game boasts two game modes blitz and standard, blitz acts more like a Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game but includes a unique slow-down feature that allows you to order and direct your players around without being overrun by the computer AI. Standard mode plays much like the original board-game version with each team taking it in turns to move.
The standard game mode is played over 16 turns (8 per half), there is a timer for each players turn ensuring that your opponent doesn’t spend too long planning their next move. You can play a match in about 15 to 20 minutes.
This game is certainly well polished, delivering exciting gameplay that doesn’t depend too much on highly detailed graphics. The game is very heavily set it the Warhammer/Games Workshop world, but I don’t think that would be much of the turn off for anyone that is interested in playing a strategy game based on a playing field.
In an interesting twist of news, the developers of the game had a run-in with Games Workshop when they produced a game named Chaos League in 2004 which was similar to the BB brand. One of the terms of the settlement was that Cyanide would receive a license to develop a new title using the official Blood Bowl property and GW took ownership of the Chaos League name. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Bowl_(2009_video_game)
