Blood Bowl Review
The Short Version: While Blood Bowl is a faithful recreation of the boardgame, ultimately it feels like a budget title that you wont play for long. Its made worse by the fact that the Xbox 360 version is gutted sorry excuse for a port and without online leagues! If your interested in blood bowl, only consider the PC version but better yet, seek out the board game!
Blood Bowl Angry Review
What you’ll Like:
• The Turn-Based Mode is a faithful 100% recreation of the board game.
• Interesting seeing all the animations that you envisioned in your head playing the board game.
• The offline campaign has all the bells and whistles, sponsorship, cheerleaders, team management – Too bad its a bore to play.
What you’ll Hate:
• The game feels like an Xbox Live Arcade title masquerading as a Full Retail Release. Not worth the $40.
• Online Leagues in the Xbox 360 Version have been Stripped out of the game. Your stats, upgrades, and progressions do not carry over into other matches at all.
• The “Real-Time” mode is a mess, whats the point? Its essentially a “pause-able” turn-based mode, without turnovers – I liked the effort to Innovate but It wasn’t executed. Why not try “real” football as in Mutant League?
• Poor Customization options for your team (only two team colors; blue and red – and you cant even choose!).
• Commentary gets annoying after the first hour of play, with no volume control and lacking video/audio options in pause menu.
Final Verdict:
Xbox: 2/10
A Worthless Insult
PC: 5/10
Average
The Board Game: 8/10
A Recommended Great Game!
Issue your own Final Score Above!
*Note this episode had a small error in the size of my “Telecaster”. Some of you may know my PC had crashed twice in the past week, I was able to recover this file with the help of the Angry Joe TechDivision! (my computer-smart followers over twitter/facebook), this was the only version that was recoverable, but its sure is better than it being lost forever. Big Thanks to you guys!
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87 thoughts on “Blood Bowl Review”
Am I the only one here who played the first PC version of Blood Bowl? Expected Joe to mention it but he didn’t …
I still have it in my collection somewhere … came on a 3.5″ floppy and I was mailed a second floppy with all the patches and updates to it from GW or whoever their publishing house was at the time, I forget. That original version rocked, I remember my human team (buffed up by the orcs, minotaur and vampire I bought from the free agents) wiping the floor with the other teams.
Especially the poor Greenfield Grasshuggers (the Halflings) who I managed to wipe out by the end of the season. Almost felt sorry for them. But they still had 4 players I hadn’t killed yet.
Thanks for the review, Joe. Now I know it might be worth picking this game up for PC one of these times when it’s on sale.
I surely love the real Board Game of Blood Bowl
Still got it somewhere in my Cabin o.O Too many Board Games in there X3
Okay I’m curious… if the board game is 8/10, why is the PC version of the game, which only has some minor issues compared to the Xbox version and is otherwise a totally faithful carry over of the board game only a 5/10. I mean with some of the bugs and issues the game had (none of which I’ve ever run into, but I recognize that they exist) I could see it being a 6/10 or a 7/10, but why 5/10?
omfg…it keeps reseting past 2:38…..
I actually got this game for a totally different reason than most people. I hate football and dislike chess, BUT I wanted a cheap way to try out wargaming. The learning curve is definitely hard, but after 4 hours of learning and finding a team I like, I’m completely crushing the AI. The interface is kind of crap, but the gameplay itself is totally solid. The game is all about manipulating chance, and I enjoy that quite a bit. I feel the mechanics have a level of depth not seen in many games nowadays. So I gave the PC Legendary Edition a 9/10, because it gave me a good gateway into wargames, and it goes beyond what I expected.
To be fair, the pc version has improved. And, for me, it’s amazing. It might not be perfect, great, or, hell, even really good in terms of UI and such, but the core gameplay is still amazing and fun. Plus, having people to play with in online leagues is great, especially if you’re like me (ie, in a very rural area where few people play video games, let alone fantasy/strategy board games that are basically slowed down football. Seriously, Checkers is as good as it gets here. Flipping checkers. Do you know how hard it is to find a chess game? Like, legitimately, it’s terrible. Bloody terrible. ).
In all fairness, PC version feels like a poor xbox port. So they basicly screwed both worlds over.
5/10 is a fair rating for this. However, the way they keep selling same game with couple more teams as Legendary and Chaos editions is just sad (atleast if you own the previous version, its only 10 euro’s.. so it’s a DLC with a DLC price). They do absolutely nothing to even try and fix the obiviously bad UI and outdated graphics.
Oh yeah, and their first game “Chaos League” in 2007 was pretty much the same, same graphics, same game play, same broken real time mode, they just didn’t have official blood bowl license. So yeah, they have been selling this same game with very few modifications for 6 years now. It’s unacceptable.
Man I don’t even know what your experience is if you feel like the PC version is a “bad xbox port” it has tons of stuff the Xbox version lacks, if anything the xbox version is a shitty PC port! The UI has some issues admittedly, but overall it’s a solid and faithful recreation of the tabletop game. As for Cyanide-Studios business model, as you stated if you already own the game you can get the extra teams and content for a fair price for what you get, and if you don’t, IIRC buying the Legendary or Chaos edition is basically buying the complete game, with all of the old stuff as well as the new… which seems totally fair.
HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHA PC is better i have the PC version
SLAP IN THE FACE!
i played the Blood Bowl Legendary Edition and it is not bad. the problem is that this game based to much on luck and some times i feel that the AI cheats. in some point in each game no matter what i do i fails, no matter what he does its a success. the teams are not balanced….i know, i know, its part of the game, but i dont like it. Skaven FTW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Noticed Crossbreed playing
Cyanide really fucked this up on the PC as well, the multiplayer interface is so broken that it might as well be nonexistant. The sheer number of hoops you have to jump through with router port forwarding and dicking around with firewalls just to GET INTO THE ONLINE LOBBY! is ridiculous and even with that done there are frequent disconnects and lag spikes. The game itself (particularly the camera) is buggy as hell.
If this had been done by a competent developer like Relic (dawn of war series) it could have been fantastic but Cyanide really dropped the ball with it
Saddened that such a good game was ruined
On another note, I’ll play you in Blood Bowl (the good one.) Skavens FTW!
Lizardman eat Skavens for dinner!!!
If you dont mind, where do you host your webpage? I am hunting for a very good web host and your web site seams to be quick and up almost all the time
he uses wordpress
Got this game dirt cheap, the NPC AI is brutal and the tutorial doesn’t work and the game is trying to login while I’m playing off line which is apparently trying to send info on my PC to someone.
It was a piece of crap and I literally threw it in the bin.
A good board game ruined? Another Shame…
My son seen me watching this episode and said to me “Dad why is he calling that football ?” because i live in Australia, football to me is Rugby League (GO Cantabury Bulldogs) He then asked do monster really play football ? heheh i couldnt stop laughing. But the funiest thing of all was he walked back up the hallway singing “Angryyyyy Jooooooeeeee”
one of the best ways they can improve this to make it not have that lackluster of play is make it a rpg element Nfl blitz type game i enjoyed it how it is but then i look at it as more of a turn based RTS but meh everyone has their opinion
I found it for $10 at Gamestop the other day (for the 360) and picked it up. I figured “Hey, I don’t want to spend an outrageous amount on the board game, and even though Joe said it sucked, I figure it’s worth $10 for the chance to at least try Blood Bowl”. We’ll see if I’m right, haven’t gotten around to playing it yet.
Howdy just wanted to give you a quick heads up. The text in your content seem to be running off the screen in Safari. I’m not sure if this is a formatting issue or something to do with browser compatibility but I thought I’d post to let you know. The layout look great though! Hope you get the problem solved soon. Kudos
I think this review was a tad biased
this game is awesome….. throughout the game, i just sat there making a chaos team only making mutations on them, well, it wasnt that super good, but i enjoyed it the time i played it
didnt they make a second version on steam?
No, but they did just release the Legendary Edition. The new edition adds in the rest of the teams from the tabletop game, a new story mode (which is a good way to feel out all the teams, know thine enemy), and it at least feels like they did some bug fixing. You get a discount on it if you already own the first release on steam (it was also severly marked down in the recent Summer Sale).
But it still doesn’t fix the piss-poor multiplayer interface and port forwarding issues
aaa i would like to know what group it was in 1:10
)
OO MY GOD!! did he die there?? 1:15 holly fuck!