Blood Bowl 2 (PC)

Blood Bowl 2 is a video game version of the popular tabletop game from the well-known Warhammer universe. The turn-based strategy/sports hybrid takes elements of (American) football and combines them with high-fantasy characters and the mechanics of dice-based strategy games. Classic races from the Warhammer universe, including Humans, Orks, Elves, Dwarves, Skaven, and others compete in teams out on the gridiron. The ultimate goal of each team is to get the spike-festooned football into the other team’s end zone. For fans of the table-top game, the fact that this is achieved with a maximum of violence is a given.

The dice are cast

Blood Bowl 2 features PvP matches and leagues, as well as several single-player campaigns. In the first campaign, you take on the role of the interim coach of a team on the verge of being disbanded, and you’re tasked with restoring them to their former glory. The “story” – inasmuch as you can actually speak of one here – does a good job of introducing players who’ve never played the table-top game or the first computer adaptation to the rules and mechanics of Blood Bowl. But at the end of the day, it all comes down to a roll of the dice.

Using the right tactics, you can increase the number of dice used in a given roll. But sometimes a risky maneuver can make it so that your enemy is able to choose the die that will decide the result of the action you pick. A good example here would be blocking members of the opposing team standing in the path of your own ball carrier. If a mere Human attempts to take on a massive Ogre, the dice are rolled. But it’s the Ogre – in this case the enemy – that gets to decide what the winning roll will be. The possibilities here would be successfully blocking and pushing the enemy out of the way, knocking the enemy out cold, or getting knocked out cold yourself. Other players can jump in to defuse the situation, however, coming to the aid of their teammate and improving his chances of making his move.

At its core, Blood Bowl 2 is an elaborate turn-based strategy game wrapped in the mantle of fantasy to provide a fitting atmosphere for its manifold tactical options. While PvP matches consist of winning the game according to the rules of Blood Bowl, the PvE campaigns feature a range of side tasks to complete. One one of them has you driving a pair of Witch Elves off the field, which typically prompts the crowd to beat them up at the very least, allowing the vampire commentator to get some “red wine” out of them. In return, he’ll bribe the official, who will promptly award your team six points.

Famous "Star Players" will also help your team complete such tasks. Star Players start with higher stats and special abilities, yet another thing that demonstrates Blood Bowl 2’s roots in the world of table-top games. All players can earn Star Points by doing certain things – usually dirty moves, extraordinary brutality, or scoring an ordinary touchdown. If they rack up enough of them, you can use them to unlock new skills in a predefined skill tree.

In the middle of it all, not on the sidelines

The graphics in Blood Bowl 2 are really solid, with some great design features. Of course, it’s no Star Wars Battlefront, but it doesn’t try so hard to flex the system’s graphics muscles, either. Nevertheless, they do an awesome job of bringing the absurd fantasy world of Blood Bowl to life on the computer screen. All the characters are depicted with great attention to detail, and you can almost feel the hard hits, solid blocks, and dirty fouls dealt by the players out on the field. The only thing that gets a bit boring are the stock cut scenes that run every time you make an especially good block or whatever. A little bit of variety would have gone a long way here. But with a game like Blood Bowl 2, which has some pretty great graphics all around, that’s really just finding something to complain about.

The sound quality isn’t all that far behind, either. The commentators and other speaking characters perfectly capture the twisted humor of Blood Bowl. While the game fully supports English and French only, there are excellent subtitles and interface localizations available for German, Spanish, Polish, and Russian, if all that reading doesn’t distract you from the action, that is.