"Solid mechanics, terrible presentation"

For years video gaming has plundered the depths of the Games Workshop for new ideas. Some like Dawn of War have lived up to expectations while others (fire warrior I'm looking at you) less so. When I first heard of blood bowl being released as a game I desperately hoped it would do justice to the many happy hours I spent with the board game. Unfortunately that is not the case.

For those not in the know blood bowl is a tabletop board game based around a game of american football set in the Warhammer world. Teams of human, orcs, high elves, chaos etc regularly take to the field to compete for trophies like the chaos cup and the bloodweiser blood bowl itself. The game itself is a lot more light hearted that most of the warhammer franchises and it is not uncommon for players to bring chainsaws and pogo sticks onto the field in an attempt to win. Games are broken down into sixteen turns for each player with half time in between and the aim is to score more touchdowns than the other player.

So how does this all translate to a videogame? The DS game plays exactly the same as the boardgame. The player is required to give members of his team actions one at a time and each action usually requires a dice roll (hidden from the player) for success. This can be pretty jarring for anyone who hasn't played the board game before as seemingly innocent actions, such as moving your player onto a ball, can cause a turn over for apparently no reason (in fact a dice roll has been made and your player has failed to pick up the ball). Once you get your head around the fact that your are playing a direct translation of a board game then things finally start to make sense.

So the problem lies not in the basic game mechanics (which are as sound as the boardgame) but in the presentation. I'll be frank, if the DS version of the game wasn't rushed out to cash in on the popularity of the pc version then I'll eat my hat.

Graphically the game looks like a bad gameboy advance game. If we can get games like mario hoops 3 on 3 and the phantom hourglass on the DS which are both pretty and action packed then there should be no problem with this game having nice graphics. For goodness sake there is only ever one character moving at a time. At the very least this should look like disgaea (which actually has more characters and a bigger space running at any one time).

The camera is locked into one isometric viewpoint and has only two levels of zoom - ridiculously small and really zoomed in. You'll play most of the game with the camera zoomed in as trying to select your players otherwise becomes impossible. There is no way to rotate your camera which means player selection can be difficult if you have a small character (eg a goblin) behind a large one ( a troll). All commands are given via the stylus, with the control pad only used to move the camera. This is a sin committed by many other DS games as well as blood bowl. Yes the stylus is very nice but that doesn't mean it has to be the only control method. Since the blood bowl field is made up of a grid the option to use the control pad would have made things much easier.

Characters can be difficult to distinguish from each other. For example it is almost impossible to tell a wood elf catcher and a lineman apart at first glance. You usually end up having to click on them just to tell what they are.

The top screen is pretty much wasted. It mainly shows the score and big versions of the team emblems. A flat map of the field (to help you plan your actions ) would have been much more helpful.

I can't comment on the sound since unless I'm playing Ouendan my DS is always on silent. If the graphics are anything to go by I wouldn't expect too much.


The games interface is poor and again ugly. A lot of the menu screens are pretty unresponsive to touch. I find myself having to click the same button multiple times before the game notices what I'm doing. Eventually you can work around this but it just reeks of a badly produced game.

I'm not really convinced about the AI either. While I will admit to playing on the lower difficulty level I have seen occasions where the opposition run away from my ball-carrying player and block some else leaving me to score easily. Thankfully this doesn't happen too often. What does, however are massive pauses between the start of your opponents turn and then them moving players. I know the game needs a bit of thinking time but being forced to watch 45 seconds of inaction each turn is taking it a bit far.

To sum up this game is an almost perfect copy of the blood bowl board game with really ugly graphics and a poor interface system. You can get past the problems and enjoy it but for most casual gamers who aren't familiar with the blood bowl rules I'd advise giving it a miss.
For those who really want to give it a go I'd advise downloading a copy of the blood bowl living rulebook (you can find in on various websites) an familiarising yourself with it before touching your DS.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 09/28/09

Game Release: Blood Bowl (EU, 09/18/09)