Blood Bowl is a combination of a tactical and sports game. The basics are extremely simple: two teams, one ball. The team that carries the ball into the opponent's end zone scores a touchdown, the team with the most touchdowns at the end of the game is the winner. However, it’s how you decide to do this that makes things interesting, the ends justify the means! It’s not just the players you have at your disposal either. You can bribe the referee to look the other way as you cripple or trample annoying opponents and hire illegal wizards to give you a hand directly from the crowd… Blood Bowl severely tests the finest tacticians' strategies. There are many races to accommodate every player’s profile (23 in the Chaos Edition, 20 in the Legendary Edition, 9 in the Standard Edition) and even more strategies for experimenting. Winning a game requires a strong game-sense and a lot of self-control. For the player's enjoyment, omnipresent humour and the use of spells, weapons, and other non-regulatory actions place Blood Bowl outside of the classic sport simulation genre.
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Mechanically, it works mostly fine. There was a bug I remember running into fairly commonly in Legendary Edition on PC where it just scrambles a player or two once you set them up for the kick off and there's nothing you can do about it, and that only happened ONE time during the 30+ hours I put into this version. Going from using a mouse to a joystick and buttons takes a little getting used to, but ultimately it's very technically competent. A little note extra, there is actually a fair bit of announcer dialogue which isn't present in Legendary Edition in this game, for those that might care. That's likely in the original PC release of Blood Bowl as well though.
Now, the single player I'm in two minds about. At first, I like it because it has a speed-up feature which essentially allows you to skip the AI's turns. This is a feature that (to the best of my knowledge) Legendary Edition, Chaos Edition, and Blood Bowl II ALL do not have, so that's really nice. What ISN'T so nice is how ABYSMAL the AI is. The AI is so brain stupid, it has terrible tactics that don't align with the races of the teams at all, it has terrible priority to the point where it will do a stupidly dangerous thing before even standing up its players, and it's just ultimately very little challenge for a remotely experienced player. It seems like they made ONE human-race AI, and then just used it for every race, which really isn't something that works well. Oddly enough, though, the AI in this game actually uses the "Blitz" extra-turn events that it gets, where the AI in Legendary Edition never does. Go figure O.o
For those of you who like achievements, the 360 achievements for this range from interesting, to damn near impossible unless you're insanely lucky. Like, I was actually able to get the "get 12 KO's in a match" achievement just barely, but that was after many hours of crafting a team almost explicitly designed to do as many injuries and KO's as possible. Getting 3 interceptions in a game or 2 with the same player in the same game though, is absolutely ridiculous. I have no idea how you'd ever do that.
Verdict: Not Recommended. The AI in this version is just so awful, I can't recommend it even though the team line up is just fine. Though you can get this version for five bucks, it's an awfully uncommon thing to find. Combine that with how much comparatively easier Blood Bowl II is to find, learn to play the game through, and how superior the AI is in that, and I can only recommend this to the most astute of Blood Bowl fans (such as myself :P )
