Blood Bowl 360

I picked up a copy of Blood Bowl for the XBox 360 at the weekend. It gets the dubious honour of being the first game that I pre-ordered for the platform.

I haven’t been about to give it much of an outing yet — I had a weekend full of friends visiting, movie watching, Dragonmeet attendance, and GMing of Fantasy Craft — but I did manage to squeeze in a couple of games last night.

I started out attempting the tutorials, but they seemed geared up more to teach Blood Bowl then the control system the game uses, which I felt left to figure out for myself (possibly I just wasn’t looking in the right places).

Once you get the hang of it, the controls are pretty easy. Point to where you want the action to happen, click, and the system figures it out. So click on a square to run to it, a teammate to pass, an opponent to block or blitz and so on. Just don’t get scared off by the range finder when you have the ball, clicking an empty square will still move to it.

So, with the controls figured out, what next?

The AI seems pretty easy, but that could be a combination of using the default settings, having played the boardgame version before and possibly finding “my team”.

I’ve never given Chaos an outing before, but they have a nice balance of stomp and speed. We’ll have to see how they handle themselves if they come up against a Dwarf team (who are as stomping as you can get but about as fast as an injured snail).

The fluff is good too. It has nice graphics and amusing commentary.

Overall? I’m looking forward to getting into it a bit more, and then venturing out onto XBox Live to see how I handle myself against intelligence that isn’t artificial.