Blood Bowl 3 Review: fantasy football with many problems. postponed!

Blood Bowl 3 is far from being in optimal shape. Given the state it is in, it is difficult to find different words to talk about the new title from Cyanide Studios. The launches of the two previous videogame iterations of the series did not go smoothly, it is true, but this time we were faced with a product plagued by obvious problems, especially on the playful and technical front. If it had been an Early Acess game we could have understood, accepted all the roughness of the experience more, but unfortunately this is not the case (and the numerous postponements apparently didn’t help much).

Football, blows and blood

What the original Blood Bowl is is soon said. This is Games Workshop’s very personal interpretation of the game of American football, using the imagery of the defunct (but returning) Warhammer fantasy to call into the field teams made up of men, elves of various types, dwarves, ogres, lizardmen, offspring of Chaos and so on and so forth, drawing with both hands from an aesthetic refined over the decades. All seasoned with a certain parodic look, so fights, injuries and even premature departures are something to laugh and joke about.

The fact that a dynamic sport like football is declined, albeit in a very bizarre version, through the rigid scan dictated by shifts, could arouse perplexity, but in reality, in practice, the game system works very well, with its videogame version that manages to streamline certain steps and reduce downtime as much as possible. Proof of this were the two products branded Cyanide Studios, especially the second the basis from which the team started to create a third iteration that wanted to improve every aspect of the experience.

Unfortunately, as things stand now, exactly the opposite happened and we want to be clear on this: 2015’s Blood Bowl 2 (here our review of Blood Bowl 2) remains absolutely the best way to enjoy the series on PC and consoles.

The first impact with Blood Bowl 3 is not the best. The interface really goes out of its way to confuse the player, between screens that are not very explanatory, items that are barely highlighted when you pass over them with the cursor and a general feeling of discomfort and lack of intuitiveness, which does not go away even after a few hours, when by now you have understood how to reach the various aspects of the offer. The passage through the tutorial is practically obligatory for those who do not know the rules, with which it takes little to become familiar. The field is a grid on which to move your players (11 per team) according to what is dictated by their movement value. Other stats like the strength, agility, armor they affect tackles, dodges and resistance to hits, adding up to the value expressed by the roll of a dice.

New in Blood Bowl 3, daughter of a 2020 update of the official rules of the miniatures game, is the statistic relating to the passage, which influences the effectiveness of the same (whereas previously this depended on the data relating to the skill). Players move each turn you try to lay down your opponents to pave the way towards the touchdown or to recover the ball, you try to get around the other team’s defense, in a way that is initially very direct and not very strategic, but which becomes more and more imaginative and satisfying when you internalize certain tactics and take advantage of special skills and actions.

Herein lies the great charm of Blood Bowl, in being able to make better use of what is proposed by the gameplay, and then real cages are created around one’s own ball holder, to protect him from tackles. Either the field is reversed with a long pass, the massacre of the opponents is organized in an almost scientific way using the toughest units, making it a health walk to get to the end. Then there is never a lack of tension, because making a mistake in any action decrees the turnover, with the initiative passing to the opponent.

Everything is beautiful when it works, a pity that this rarely happens in multiplayer and never in single. Blood Bowl 3’s campaign is unplayable at times, because it is afflicted by a myriad of bugs that are far from negligible. There is no other way to define, for example, the failure of the shift timer: it often happens that when the two minutes are reset, the action goes on as if nothing had happened, until the case decides to move on to the next instance.

Artificial intelligence repeatedly shows serious limitations, in the sense that it also takes the entirety of two minutes to carry out a few actions, and sometimes even wrong ones. In fact, it happens that between a favorable and an adverse result of the dice, he chooses the second, leaving the player astonished. These are just some of the most striking episodes that can occur, and which unfortunately have a perceptible impact on the pleasure of the single player experience.

Between multiplayer and other problems

Better, as mentioned, goes in the multiplayer, which is clearly not based on the management of the challenge by the CPU. Unfortunately, even the shiniest component of the package isn’t exempt from significant imperfections. At launch the situation was disastrous but even now disconnections are frequent.

Furthermore, malfunctions that affect the games in a more or less significant way are frequent. Sometimes for example the unit’s abilities do not activate or it is impossible to select some particular actions, for unknown reasons. Then there are two last issues to address, namely the technical side and purchases with real currency. In the first case, even a casual glance is enough to notice how similar the title is to its predecessor, which indeed in terms of detail and variety of players, choice of colors and legibility of the action appears even superior to Blood Bowl 3.

So we come to the game shop, which allows you to buy cosmetic items with real currency. So far there would be no problem, but the fact is that buying an item means making it available to a single player. A shoulder pad is effectively just an aesthetic element and not another option to customize the entire team. The developers have promised to intervene to change this aspect but today things are like this.