Worth: $6.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Intro:
… a desperate fumble.
During the various lockdowns that made life on Earth so spicy over the last few years, many people developed new and interesting hobbies. Some folks started making their own sourdough, some started knitting with great alacrity, others decided to really invest in becoming raging alcoholics, and your humble word janitor… Well, he started playing Blood Bowl 2.
Yes, despite a lifetime of finding sport unfathomably dull and being baffled by the mathematics involved in dice-based gaming, I became oddly obsessed with the video game (based on the tabletop game) about American football played by Warhammer fantasy characters including orcs, goblins, beast-men, skaven (rat men), demons and even some humans to round things out. Why? I don’t know. Something about the world, the sense of humour, the complete undies-on-the-head lunacy of the whole caper appealed. It also didn’t hurt that the game cost about seven dollarydoos on Playstation.
And you know what? It’s bloody fun! Sure, it’s looking a little rough around the edges (it was released in 2015 after all) but the gameplay is weirdly addictive (albeit heavily reliant on dice roll RNG) and the sheer zaniness of the main conceit is appealing enough to help you shoulder through the various slumps of a bad run, or a fiddly mechanic here and there. That said, when I heard a third game was going to be released, I was keen to play the same great game with updated graphics and animation. And while the several delays were a bummer, your cock-eyed optimist of a scribe thought “hey, at least it’ll be perfect when it comes out.”
Well now, finally, in 2023, Blood Bowl 3 has arrived and it’s an absolute shocker of a launch for a game that might, one day, eventually be playable. But right now? Yikes.
Blood Bowl 3 is the same basic game as its predecessor. And on the slender positive side, it does look a lot crisper, and the animations are smoother. Everything else, however, is a step backwards in quality.
For a start, features that should be available at launch – like being able to save and quit a match and come back later – are missing. If you have to leave a match for real world reasons, or the game crashes (which it does constantly), it counts as a loss and that’s that. The microtransactions are predatory to the point of self-parody, with items to customise your team one-use only, creating an artificial reason to spend more of your hard-earned dosh.
In a fully functioning game, this would be unacceptable, but in a game this broken and feature-incomplete, it feels almost like a piece of anti-capitalist performance art. Oh, and forget about enjoying matches with friends or strangers online, the servers are completely stuffed at time of writing, and you’ll be lucky to finish a game against the (appalling) AI, much less join a league or test your skills against actual human beings.
It’s sad too, because when the game does actually work (which is rare), it’s quite fun! There’s definitely potential here and in about 6-12 months, it might actually be finished and worth playing. Right now, however, this is a buggy, unfinished, quasi-broken product pushed out to market long before it was ready, for reasons almost certainly pertaining to greed and avarice, saddled with one of the most jaw-droppingly rapacious monetisation schemes in recent memory. As such, in its current state, it is impossible to recommend. You could probably pick up Blood Bowl 2 for a song, mind you, so if you find the bizarre premise as delightfully goofy as I do, you can still hook in and hope that one day Cyanide Studios sorts out its latest iteration. Until then, however, this is a desperate fumble.
