![]() ![]() Instead, each race has two teams you can choose from, usually one being more offense-focused and one being agility-focused. While the game has several playable races including High Elves, Lizardmen and even Undead, it lacks the team builder from the original games. If you’re coming from the mainline Blood Bowl games, be prepared for a bad time. The fact that there’s no option for naming your teams silly things like after 80s cartoon heroes is downright appalling Content Heck, you can’t even push anyone into the stands anymore. It’s not even “flashier” Blood Bowl because there aren’t any of the cool armor break animations and random deaths. It lacks a lot of the depth and nuance of Blood Bowl, and all it’s really got to show for it is faster match times. If I had to sum up my complaints, it feels like Death Zone wasn’t really clear what it wanted to be. You kind of wish the developers had thought of a way to seamlessly move between commanding troops and casting spells considering the aim of this game, but I’ll chalk that up to another disappointment. ![]() On top of that, moving your units is a mess, especially if you’re trying to cast a spell. I feel like there’s not much to it tactically, and the games weirdly floaty pacing doesn’t make for a great sense of thrill. When playing it from a neutral perspective, it’s a kind of mediocre sports game. To look at the game on its own merits isn’t to do it many favors, either. Sometimes player skills like Dodge will activate, or a player will get injured but the game never really bothers to tell you what any of these means. Moreover, when the game tries to convince you it’s still Blood Bowl is when it gets most jarring. A lot of the hair-pulling strategy of the original is gone, and gameplay rarely feels more complex than “make sure fast boi has ball while big boi punches bad guys”. But unlike Blood Bowl, Death Zone has them watered down so much that many of them feel almost unnecessary. To its credit, many mechanics from Blood Bowl are actually in the game like fouls and passing. You click on your units and move them in real-time, also casting skills with a hotbar at the bottom while your players chase a Squig and carry it to the end zone for points. “But enough about how it looks, how does Death Zone play?” I hear you ask.ĭeath Zone has much smaller teams than your standard game of Blood Bowl, with 4-5 players per team. Doesn’t feel nearly as satisfying, though. If anything, the game’s adherence to Blood Bowl’s aesthetics almost seem to hurt it, because as someone whose lifespan was severely shortened by Blood Bowl, seeing a similar design aesthetic but having it not quite mark leaves an uncanny valley vibe.Ī lot of standard Blood Bowl principles apply, like “always outnumber your opponent to win fights”. I guess it helps with the Sports Broadcast theme of the game, but I feel like if you consider the game’s shorter time per match, you’d want the score to be more visible so you know how much you have to catch up. for The score sits in the corner of the screen, which feels off to look at. Many of the complains I’d level against Death Zone here would be about its HUD. And if it were a mobile game, it would probably seem less offensive for it. In a way, Death Zone almost looks like a mobile version of Blood Bowl. There’s only one type of Touchdown animation, with the exact same crowd shots. Yet despite sharing so many assets, there’s something weirdly inferior to the look of Death Zone. The game looks identical to Blood Bowl, as they share many assets. There’s not much to talk about in the design here because if you like Blood Bowl, you’ll have no qualms with the look of Death Zone. On the one hand, the idle poses really look like a bunch of miniatures. The elevator pitch is simple: What if Blood Bowl, but more accessible to more people? It’s an interesting experiment, but the results may have left much to be desired. Now, Cyanide Studios, the same studio behind the original Blood Bowl have released Blood Bowl: Death Zone. It combined methodical tabletop play with flashy animations only found in videogames in a spectacle that was both very fun to watch and very much skill-based. Where else would you get a mash up of American football and Warhammer Fantasy with half the regulations? For many people, Blood Bowl and its sequel, Blood Bowl 2 was a great gateway into tabletop gaming. ![]()
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