Blood Bowl 3 Review – A fresh coat of Citadel paint

When I heard a third Blood Bowl game was coming out, I was a bit confused. It felt like just yesterday Blood Bowl 2 was announced, and my friends and I were systematically killing our linemen and forgetting about the ball completely. When I looked up Blood Bowl 2’s release date to refresh my memory, I felt a pain in my gut that only comes when you’re reminded of the passage of time.

After struggling with my own mortality for a minute, I loaded up Blood Bowl 3 and went straight into making my newest lineman-killing squad.

Blood Bowl is a massively popular game, but it maintains a sort of niche player base so I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the people reading this review have yet to hear of it. I certainly had no idea what Games Workshop or the great Warhammer ip was when I first discovered Blood Bowl on the Xbox 360 store as a kid.

So for those who don’t know, Blood Bowl is a turn-based high-fantasy-football game where dice rolls determine whether or not you can make a touchdown in the other team’s endzone. From that description alone, I’m sure a lot of people can get an understanding of just how niche Blood Bowl’s community is.

The goal in fantasy football is, of course, to score more touchdowns than the enemy team (and yes, they really are your enemies in this violent version of the sport.) Each turn, you run your team of players through a series of actions that include running, passing, tackling, or stomping on the throats of downed enemies. A random number generator (or dice roll) determines your success on each action.

One thing that certainly sets Blood Bowl apart from regular football is the mechanic to maim and kill enemy players. Effectively, this creates a new kind of strategy besides just outmaneuvering the enemy and getting the ball into the endzone: Kill all of the enemy’s linebackers, and you can just walk the ball into the end zone.

Certain players on your team perform actions better than others. Catchers have a bonus to the success rate of dice rolls on, you guessed it, catching, with similar ideas applying to Throwers, Blitzers and giant monsters (Blockers?) Your turn ends when someone on your team fails an action, so strategizing who does what and gambling on a play is the core of the game.

Different fantasy races add an extra level of depth to the game, so you aren’t just playing shove with more or less equal teams. Orcs are bigger, stronger, and meaner than well-rounded Humans, and Elves have an affinity for running and catching gracefully.

Team management and customization goes as deep as buying cheerleaders to help motivate the team, hiring assistant coaches, and even buying sponsorships for extra abilities on the field.

The first Blood Bowl video game was released in 2009, and people have been playing it on the tabletop for even longer. There really isn’t anything else like it on the market.

The dedicated Blood Bowl audience was enough to justify a third installment of the series, which, if I’m being honest, serves the kind of like another Madden or Fifa launch title. That is to say, Blood Bowl 3 offers a fresh coat of paint and some updated QoL improvements on a game that has already existed for two past titles.

Graphically, Blood Bowl 3 is the best in the series. I feel like that goes without saying; The game looks great, though I prefer some of the costume designs in Blood Bowl 2 over the ones in this title, specifically for the humans.

Customization in this game is great. You can manually recruit your players, customizing the type of team you have down to the individual members. Then, you can go in and change the colors and emblems they wear on their jerseys, with a list of Citadel Paints as your color choices.

My first team, Malekith’s Malicious, rocked a sweet black and red. Evil Sunz Scarlet is one of my favorite Citadel colors.

Beyond that, you’re basically playing Blood Bowl 2, but with less team variety. Not counting the tons of DLC teams available for Blood Bowl 2, the starting roster in that game was Humans, Orcs, Dwarfs, Skaven, High Elves, Dark Elves, Bretonnians, and Chaos. Blood Bowl 3 trades Bretonnians for Nurgle, and adds a very “new” teams that really just consist of using a mixed roster from the other races.

In addition, there are two DLC teams at the moment, Imperial Nobility and Black Orcs. Both are reskins of the Humans and Orcs, respectively.

All in all, this felt a little cheap to me. With such a large variety of teams available through DLC for Blood Bowl 2, you would’ve thought we’d see some more of them come to this game’s roster as base game content. That’s what they did with Nurgle, after all.

Besides this, my biggest gripe with the game is that it seems like the AI needs a bit of tuning. In my offline match against the Skaven in campaign mode, the computer would upwards of four minutes just to decide what to do with a single team member. I’m not sure if this was on the fault of my processor or the game itself, but it definitely was conducive to a fun experience.

That being said, if you’re a Blood Bowl fanatic, this game has everything you want. It’s the exact same gameplay you loved from the first two games, with a lot more cosmetic options and gorgeous new graphics.

There really isn’t a lot more to say than that; This game was made for a target audience, and for that audience, it was made really well.

Try Hard Guides was provided with a PC review copy of this game. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website! Blood Bowl 3 is available on Steam, Epic Games, and the Playstation and Xbox stores.