You'll notice this review hasn't really mentioned the real-time mode yet, and this is because it appears to having been coded as something of an afterthought oddity. In real-time mode, you move your guys around in the classic real time strategy way, pausing the game every now and again to direct everybody nearby towards the opposition player with the ball or run your own chap out of danger. Er ... that's pretty much it. It's sort of fun to mess around with for a couple of games, but very easy to win and provides almost none of the tactical depth of the turn-based approach. If you were hoping for this game mode to be the equal of the turn-based mode, rather than a minor distraction, you will be quite disappointed.

It seems clear that the game's main intention is to provide a PC version of the tabletop game, to be enjoyed by players already familiar with Blood Bowl. Unfortunately, this results in a lack of accessibility which will be absolutely baffling for complete beginners. Although the tutorial teaches the absolute basics, it's pretty lacking in the kind of detail a new player would require to gain a fundamental understanding of how progress in the game. For a strategy game based on numbers and rolls of the dice, Blood Bowl seems to go really out of its way to hide all of this lovely data from the player.

Dodging, for instance, comes down to a host of factors like a player's agility, how many opposition tackle zones he is dodging into and perhaps what specialist skills he or the opposition players may have. The game represents this by sticking an icon of a die down on the board, letting you know a roll will be necessary. Great. What the game won't tell you is what that required roll actually is until it has either succeeded or failed - at which point it will appear in the truncated log file in the lower left of the screen (and the player will either skip free or fall over.) The only way to figure out the roll beforehand would be to read the current tabletop Blood Bowl rulebook and work it out in your head. To be expected to do this, when one of the main points in favour of a videogame version is that it calculates that stuff for you, is absolutely bananas.

Another example: apothecaries are handy medical specialists that can be purchased for teams, allowing injury results to be re-rolled. If the apothecary can roll up a 'badly hurt' result, this represents them patching a player up and getting them back out on the field - rather than the usual meaning of 'out of the rest of this game and the next.' This is in the tabletop Blood Bowl rules and is correctly represented here. Just imagine, though, how bizarre that looks to a new player. The only feedback they've had from the game is that a player is 'badly hurt' and yet somehow able to rejoin play. For all the world it would look like a ridiculous bug. All the user interface has to do is add a bit of text explaining that a 'badly hurt' roll for an apothecary means the player can continue in this case, but this simply isn't provided.

This happens far too often. There are few concessions made towards players who have not read the full Blood Bowl tabletop rules. Just to reiterate, these are rules that are not included with the PC version or its manual. They're freely available online, but for a total beginner it would be bewildering to have to study some external documents to fully enjoy the game.

For veterans too there are a some niggles, but these are nowhere near as serious as the obtuse approach to information in the user interface. The goblin team are missing their bombardier character for unknown reasons, pre-match weather is not implemented and you can see from the fix list of the latest patch that (at the time of writing) several of the player skills are in need of a tweak. In a more general sense, the 'end turn' button could perhaps do with a confirmation message to avoid the knuckle-gnawing horror of accidental clicks. Likewise, the final few seconds of the turn countdown timer could perhaps have used a special noise indicating you should get a move on.

As somebody who's a bit of Blood Bowl fan, however, these problems didn't overwhelm a decent PC conversion. The game looks great, and maintains the exhilaration of well-executed drives as well as the infuriation at unlucky dice rolls. Patches have already fixed, or are fixing, a few loose ends - and the next one claims to be an improvement to multiplayer stability. Hopefully we'll be seeing a few more teams added in the future too. Absolute beginners should be extremely wary though. The interface is unforgiving and it's pretty much necessary to read this document before diving in. If you know nothing about the tabletop game, the score comes with a Blood Bowl style modifier of -2.0 points.

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