Seneste anmeldelser af ⎛⎝GriddleOctopus⎠⎞

A solid combination of FTL and Sid Meier's Pirates, with the graphics of Don't Starve thrown in.

Blood Bowl 2 is a note-perfect recreation of a Games Workshop tabletop American Football game set in the Warhammer Fantasy Battle universe. That means it’s turn-based, packed with dice-based randomness and heavy with rules that are quite mystifying to new players. Oh, and it’s chock-full of Orcs, Vampires, Skeletons, Ogres, Trolls, Elves and Dwarfs, violence, and cheating.

In a typical match, players (either human or AI) take turns moving and blocking with their team, whilst trying to get the pigskin ball from their half to the opponent’s backline for a touchdown. Just like American football, passing is a huge gamble and many teams just play a running game, or even a hitting game where you just try to injure your opposing team.

There are dice rolls for almost everything. Want to move out of a player’s tackle zone? Move a die. Want to pass the ball? Throw that die. Want to sprint an extra square? Run that die. Want to grind on a downed player’s throat to send him out of the match? Stamp on the die. Blocking is represented by throwing multiple dice depending on the player’s relative strengths, with the higher strength player allowed to pick the outcome from the dice. Fortunately, the game now tells you what the percentage chance of success is, rather than having to work it out yourself from basics.

Given that the match engine is built on so much randomness, Blood Bowl is actually all about learning, positioning, and avoiding gambling until you have to. Even what seems like the most sure-fire action can result in a horrific failure. A three-dice block from a levelled-up strong player on a rookie should knock them down 95 percent of the time, but that small chance of the veteran going down does crop up, and you have to play knowing that.

Any failure, however minor, means a turnover, where control switches to the opponent. So, if players are unlucky enough to fail their first action every turn then the game can be over very quickly, but a game between two players who know what they’re doing, who only take calculated risks, can last more than half an hour.

Every turn has you organising the most important actions in your head, then recognising their probabilities. You always move your players into covering and supporting positions first, if possible. Sometimes you don’t do things just because a small chance of failure is enough to ruin your plan entirely. Let’s say you have a three-dice block lined up which would likely result in an injury, which would give you a numerical advantage in later turns. But you have also have a ball-carrier standing near the enemy scoring zone with enemy players just a few steps behind them. Here, you play the ball, not the man. Scoring is the most important thing, and only when you’re way ahead can you afford to gamble.

Unless, of course, you’re a team that plays the man, not the ball, like the high strength Chaos team or the block skill-heavy Dwarf team. The aim of these guys is to be as close with as many players as possible, get them on the floor, then stamp on them when they’re down. Even with the average human team, I played games where I knocked out almost the entire opposing team and just ran the ball to the touchline each turn.

That’s the joy of Blood Bowl, the way that the slightly different stats, costs, skills, and levelling path of each team member will result in huge team differences that play out in every action. The extra point of strength that a Black Orc has over a normal Orc means that he’ll normally be attacking with two dice instead of one, which hugely increases his chance of success.

Developer Cyanide has improved the game substantially since its previous iteration, renovating the terrible UI and making it much more understandable and user-friendly. New elements like the Cabalvision preview let you see what will happen with your current action should you choose to go ahead with it. There are still problems, however. It seems to take ages to block an opponent, as you pick the target, confirm the block, roll the dice, choose whether to re-roll, pick a single die from your roll, pick the direction that the opponent will be pushed, choose whether your player will follow up, and finally have to watch a short unskippable cutscene of the block. In a turn you might do several of these blocks, which is why there’s a timer to restrict the turn to four minutes.

Though the individual games are important and enjoyable, it’s the league modes where the game really comes to life. These are single-player or online multiplayer, with a wide management model (now including stadium upgrades) and handicapping to balance weak teams against strong ones. Every difficult action in the match game (scoring, passing, injuring) gives XP to your players, and as they level you get a choice of random upgrades to customise them. My chaos team’s Minotaur got a mutation that replaced his left hand with an enormous claw, massively increasing his chances of injuring people.

Injuries or deaths in a single game are just annoyances, because they can take key players out of your team for the rest of the match. A permanent injury can also render a player effectively useless; who wants a slow catcher or a half-blind thrower? But in the campaign mode, replacing a dead or crippled player can be horribly expensive. Teams with low armour, like the agile Skaven or the Wood Elves, are especially prone to this, but even tough teams regularly lose players.

Cyanide has made some welcome changes to the League system, making it slightly more comprehensible and matches easier to arrange. They’ve introduced ageing into the league modes, so that teams really do change over time, meaning you can’t rely on that star player always being there. The new online transfer market is a bit more of a gamble (see Diablo III); there were no players listed in the review version so we’re not sure how well it’s going to work. But the new live streaming and replay integration (under the name Cabalvision) is a very welcome touch.

This version also introduces a single-player campaign mode, which was the most egregious absence from the earlier games. You’re the new coach of the Reikland Reavers, the most famous human team, which has fallen on hard times. Most of them have been killed, their two-star players are in hiding, and a strange new sponsor is manipulating them behind the scenes. Through the long campaign you’ve got to recover the team’s fanbase and standing, rebuild the team from a bunch of rookies, recover your star players, and discover what the nefarious plot is that threatens the team every match.

You can really tell that Cyanide has put a huge amount of work into this, from the gorgeous animations throughout, to the gentle humour of the two commentators, to the sheer length of the story. Many missions have surprise events that happen partway through, or tough victory conditions that you have to achieve, as well as winning the game. The AI teams still make stupid mistakes but, hey, that's AI.

For a French recreation of a British board game pastiching an American hobby, Blood Bowl 2 is remarkably coherent. Perhaps if Cyanide had stuck less rigorously to the board game and streamlined some of the processes, then they’d have made a better video game too, albeit one that could have alienated their hardcore fanbase. Yet overall, Blood Bowl 2 is a step forward. It's a much friendlier, easier game than its predecessors, with improved looks, a tutorial campaign, controller support, and UI improvements. New players won't feel blocked off from enjoying it.

THE GOOD
Handsome-looking fantasy monstrosities
Deep, complex tactical sports management
Long single-player campaign
Charismatic, witty in-game dialogues

THE BAD
Underlying mechanics are still a challenge for new players
Plodding actions in-game, slowed further by animations
Deep knowledge required to participate in online leagues

I was hoping this was a one-stop easy-to-set-up shop for recording and streaming. It's not. It loses my settings every time it closes, it fails to record video most of the time and it fails to connect to Twitch all the time.

I like this game because I wrote it. What? Whaaat?!

I kickstarted this game and rapidly regretted it. It makes a virtue out of boring and disempowering the player. It's gradually improving, but the mechanics at the moment are too slow to get into and the point of doing anything is sadly missing. After hours of playing, I got nowhere near the flash images in the carousel above.

I love Blood Bowl, so I couldn't resist playing this - but at the moment, it's in beta, and it's in no fit state to play. You're supposed to build up a team, train them and specialise each of them. But the key element - working out better plays for your team- is buried away in menus and the game as a whole is buggy as hell. Moreover, you can only ever have a handful of players on your team, so buying a new player means disposing of an old experienced one, which unnecessarily limits your tactical flexibility. Given that nothing's changed in the beta for months, I'd avoid this.

A subtle, understated and old-fashioned adventure game.