Blood Bowl: Death Zone Review: A Massive Fumble
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Blood Bowl: Death Zone is not the ideal game of murderous football that you’re likely looking for. In fact, it’s not much of anything at all.
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When you really think about it, American football is the ultimate real-time strategy game. You have a squad of units with specific functions, an enemy team, and an objective that needs to be captured in order to score. So, taking football, and turning it into a full-on RTS game complete with bloody battles and orcs is kind of a logical next step.
Unfortunately, despite the potential of that idea, Blood Bowl: Death Zone is not the ideal game of murderous football that you’re likely looking for. In fact, it’s not much of anything at all.
The Bloody Premise
Blood Bowl: Death Zone is a side game in the Blood Bowl tabletop universe, in which two teams led by a star Blood Bowl player do battle in a four-on-four football game. The game doesn’t really have anything resembling a story. In fact, when the game first loads up, it kind of just plops you into the main menu, and you stumble your way around from there.
The goal is to get the ball (which is actually some kind of weird fantasy animal called a Squig) to the enemy team’s end zone just like in regular football. It plays like an RTS, clicking on units to select them, and then right-clicking on parts of the field to move the unit, or clicking on enemies to attack, with the goal of scoring as many touchdowns as possible in a set time limit. Units have a certain amount of armor, and they can be knocked out, or injured, which takes them out of that round.
There are also spells that can be used to give players an advantage, such as summoning lightning, healing teammates, and charging forward. Some of these are useful, but some of them didn’t really seem to do anything, or what they did was ill-defined.
With Teams This Stupid, Who Needs Strategy?
A lot of what happens in Blood Bowl: Death Zone doesn’t really seem clear. It’s hard to tell why some units are doing what they’re doing, or if they’re even doing damage. Sometimes it seems like they’re doing nothing at all, even if you’ve given them a command.
The enemy A.I. is even worse, as they all seem to have taken too many knocks to the head. They’ll often stare blankly as you run the ball in for a touchdown. Sometimes they’ll grab the ball, and just stop, as if they’ve forgotten what game they’re playing. I was hoping this was kind just because I was playing on an easier difficulty, but there doesn’t seem to be any harder difficulties, meaning that this is as smart as the game gets. The game can be played against other humans, though I wasn’t able to find many people online who were looking for a match. Even during the few games I did have, playing another person didn’t make Blood Bowl feel any better.
The game just isn’t any fun. In order for a strategy game to be enjoyable, there needs to be some actual strategy involved. Blood Bowl is just mindless clicking against really stupid A.I, or another person who’s likely just as bored as you are, with maybe the occasional spell thrown in for extra flavor.
Not The Prettiest Sport
The game’s intelligence might also be hurting from the various bugs I encountered. Aside from characters just not reacting to anything, the ball would occasionally disappear during the round, some units would kind of endlessly battle without either one taking any damage, and when some characters ran into each other their animations would start to glitch out. There were also some significant stuttering and freezing at times, which was confusing considering that the game isn’t all that graphics-intensive and shouldn’t be pushing anyone’s hardware.
Speaking of the graphics, they’re ugly. Very ugly. No matter how high the graphics settings were pushed, everything looked crude and low rez. The character animations all look stilted, with the crowd appearing to only be able to robotically clap or flail their arms, and the battle animations are too repetitive to make up for the fact that nothing exciting is happening. It also seems like the game only has one arena to play in, so there’s not even multiple locales to experience the tedium.
The sound is also pretty terrible. There seems to be maybe one or two music tracks in the whole game, and they’ll randomly cut out during the actual Blood Bowl matches, leaving only an awkward silence that’s filled with the lackluster battle sounds and crowd noise, which was likely royalty-free. If two teams of orcs, or dwarves, or elves, or whatever are fighting each other to the death over a living football, it’d be nice to hear something more epic than the same muted groans and thuds over and over.
On top of all of this, the game is lacking a ton of options to make the game palatable in any way. There’s no real difficulty options, no real graphical settings, and you really only have the choice to play some standard A.I. matches, online matches against other human players, or a full-on league mode where you can do battle against other mindless computer controlled teams over and over.
Don’t Waste Your Sunday With This
Blood Bowl: Death Zone is not very good, which is likely due to this game being more of a side project than an all-out Blood Bowl release. However, considering that this game was actually in Early Access for a few months before its launch, you would have thought that they may have fixed the bugs, done some adjustments to the A.I., added more features and options, or at least made the gameplay more fun and dynamic. Instead, it looks like they got the game up to a point to where it was functional, and decided that was good enough to push it out the door.
The game is only around 15 bucks, but even at that price point, it’s definitely not worth it. There are better RTS games, better football games, and better games in general. Don’t bother with Blood Bowl: Death Zone, grab some friends, and go play some actual football outside. At least you’ll get some fresh air, exercise, and any fights you get into will be way more fun.
1 Out Of 5 Stars
A review copy of Blood Bowl: Death Zone was provided to TheGamer by Cyanide Studio. Blood Bowl: Death Zone is available on PC.
Jamie Latour is a writer and actor based out of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. From his hyperactive childhood to his….Well, still hyperactive adulthood, he’s been writing and performing in some capacity for practically his entire life. His love for video games goes all the way back to the age of 4, playing Mega Man 3 for the first time on his NES. He’s an avid gamer and can be found nowadays either messing around in Red Dead 2, or being cheap as can be as Reaper in Overwatch. He’s still starting out when it comes to making online content, but aside from his writing he can found on his Twitch page under the handle SpontaneousJames. You can also find him on social media as @SpontaneousJam on Twitter (because Spontaneous James was too long apparently).
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