Blood Bowl 2 – Review

Blood Bowl 2 is a mix of Warhammer, American Football and turn based strategy, together with a whole lot of violence and brutality. Take on the brutal chaos or the small dwarves and injure everyone on the playing field to your liking. Lead the legendary Reikland Reavers or make your own team and battle it out online against other players, but keep in mind to use lots of violence!

Story

Blood Bowl 2 takes place in the Warhammer universe. Of course, a lot of the races from Warhammer Fantasy can be found in the game, and it also tries to bring a little bit of a story, more or less. In the campaign, you’ll be the team captain of the Reikland Reavers, a team of humans which is almost bankrupt after the last season. JJ Griswell Jr now calls upon you to be the new coach of the team, hoping you can save him from bankruptcy.

As far as the story goes, it’s pretty much what you’d expect: limited. Most sports games don’t even try to bring a story, but this isn’t an ordinary sports game of course! However, the little “story” that goes into the game is pretty fun, especially the commentators that go with it.

Graphics

The graphics in blood Bowl 2 are really good. Everything looks great and it’s really fun to look at. Everything from the tribune to the players and playing field are fairly detailed and accompany the game nicely. You can also customize your armor and players’ look, so you can really make your team unique as to your likings.

However, the graphics options for Blood Bowl are simply abysmal. For such a big game, one would expect more than just a quality slider that goes from very low to very high. It’s things like these that wouldn’t cut it for people that have old systems because Blood Bowl is quite a demanding game at times. You also have the option to disable grass and spectators, but that isn’t likely to make a huge difference.

Sound

When it comes to sound, Blood Bowl is pretty enjoyable. The music and sound effects fit the game perfectly and it’s a lot of fun just listening to the game. The commentators will keep babbling on about stupid and useless things, which can be very fun at times.

Luckily, the game does feature some good sound options, allowing you to change the volume of sound effects, music and commentary individually, which is really a must for any game.

Gameplay

In short, Blood Bowl 2 is a turn based American Football game. Sounds confusing? Well, it can be at times, but that doesn’t spoil all the fun you’ll be having. Following the tabletop Warhammer game, Blood Bowl utilizes a system of dice rolls and turn based gameplay, which makes it a lot more strategy involved than if it would be real time sports. The game is fully controlled with the mouse (you can use the keyboard for camera controls) but controller support is also possible.

Of course, Blood Bowl 2 tries to follow the rules of American Football as much as possible, but there’s a lot of extra rules and possibilities that go into a Blood Bowl game. This is where the campaign comes in handy. When playing the campaign, the commentators see you as a new player to the game, and this also reflects in the gameplay of the campaign itself. A lot of tutorial dialogs will pop up on your screen, and every game will introduce more gameplay elements for you to play around with. This is very good for new players as they can ease themselves into the game, but veterans will probably be disappointed a lot with the campaign since it feels like one big tutorial.

Everything in the game is controlled by randomness and chance. The most important one: attacking. Every time you try to attack an opponent, chance is taken into an account. You’ll have to roll a D6 and this will tell you what action to perform, whether it be good or bad (you can buy rerolls later in the campaign). Of course it’s possible to roll multiple dice in one attack and choose from the best outcome, but this is all determined by your strength, the enemies’ defense, how many enemies surround you and how many teammates surround you. Especially the constraint of “players surrounding you” is crucial, you’ll have to have a good strategy and set up your players well in order to get assists and get the better of the opponent.

The game itself is played on a large grid, which is your playing field. Every player has a range of squares he can move and he can sprint two blocks outside that range, but this is also modified by chance as you might trip and injure yourself during sprinting. Trying to pass a square right next to an enemy also holds risk, as he will lunge for you while you run by.

You win the game by of course scoring touch downs, and the team with the most score wins. A game always takes 16 turns for each team, so 32 in total. After eight turns it’s half time, this gives injured and knocked out players a chance to get back into the playing field.

Furthermore, there’s all sorts of crazy stuff that can happen. Knock a player outside the playing field and the crowd will give him a beating, you can also KO, injure or kill enemies, the referee can go onto the field and knock some of your players down, you can kick an enemy in the guts when he’s already laying on the ground, and much much more. A lot is possible and the game even rewards you for doing crazy stuff.

As said, the campaign will introduce more and more rules with every match, so if you’re new it’s suggested to try that out. There’s a lot of little rules that haven’t been mentioned yet, so we haven’t spoiled all of the fun. Players with more experience can play online with leaderboards or just play some friendly matches online.

Conclusion

Blood Bowl 2 is a crazy mix of turn based strategy, American Football, Warhammer and violence, lots of violence. You’ll be playing a heavily modified version of American Football which allows you to do almost anything, like killing and knocking out the enemy team until it’s an 11 on 4 match. Fans of Warhammer will have a lot of fun despite it being a sports game, but experienced players might have some trouble with the campaign as it’s pretty much made as a tutorial.

Subsonic

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