Fantasy Football that I sort of cared about...Blood Bowl

The Basics: Old-School Fantasy themed Football boardgame brought to PC

Previous Time Spent: 10 minutes

Expectation of learning Curve: high 

Why I bought this: I'm a farily big Games Workshop nerd, having painted and collected Warhammer stuff in High School and a little bit in College, and the wackiness of this idea met a great steam sale, leading to an unwise purchase. 

First Impressions: The first things that jumped out at me were the irritating voices of the announcers and the fairly ugly UI design.

My 3 hours: I played through the tutorial, and a number of games as Dwarves, Orcs, Skaven, Chaos Dwarves and Demons of Nurgle, one of the Chaos Gods presented in game. I was expecting something along the lines of fantasy Madden, and was initially very frustrated with the difficulty of the game and the presentation. This is not a game that holds your hands outside of the brief tutorial, and based on my notes, I pretty consistently believed myself to be terrible at it. Over time though, I came to appreciate how much it felt like a boardgame, and the way that a more dedicated person could invest a lot of time in learning the systems and developing a team.

This game is great when it comes to variety and character. Each one of the races that I tried felt very different in play, and led to a lot of fun on the field. My favorite (which was not a surprise to me at all due to my history with the tabletop game) were the Skaven, the weirdo coward rat-men from Warhammer Fantasy. They handled very differently than the other races, and seemed to have an interesting mix of speed and mean-spirited play that suited me well. I also enjoyed the variety of cool arenas.

I found some elements frustrating, including the aforementioned announcers, and the bizarre level of challenge for activities that I would expect to be a near 100% chance of success. The announcers quickly became fairly repetitive, and I just never found them as funny or helpful as I think they were intended to be. Additionally, the chance of completing some tasks seemed hilariously low. For instance, picking up the football from the ground would frequently fail, leading me to wonder if my players were athletes or drunken toddlers in the bodies of adults. Nonetheless, I think a lot of my frustrations with the game would be resolved with taking more time to learn the systems involved.  

My highlight: Playing as the Skaven and playing a game to a tie, rather than a crushing defeat. After a high level of difficulty is established, a tie feels pretty good. 

My verdict: Blood Bowl is a fun and bizarre take on a classic board-game, but I think if it's skewing so close to the way the board game is played, I'd rather just take it to the table-top with friends. I also have to give it credit for making me halfway care about football for a few hours. 

Next post will come in roughly 2 weeks with the whimsy of Indie Darling Braid.

Back in Blackguards (well, for 3 hours anyway)

The Basics: X-Com meets Pathfinder/D&D

Previous Time Spent: 2 hours

Expectation of learning Curve: medium 

Why I bought this: I'm a big x-com fan, and have been a D&D nerd for years

First Impressions: I was initially put off by way the characters were developed, and the art direction. Also, the first 2 or 3 fights are sort of set up as tutorials, but are easy enough to become boring instead of real learning experiences.  

My 3 hours: I played through character creation, the story intro, a prison-break tutorial (in which the supporting characters are all introduced), and a couple hours of the main game. In general, I found that it was a tad linear, and didn't allow for much in the way of actual choices. Gameplay was segregated into top-down grid based combat that will be familiar to fans of X-Com, Final Fantasy Tactics, Pathfinder or 4th Edition D&D, and a strategic map in which you move between nodes, and improve your character . I loved the look of the strategic map, but I found that it didn't provide much in the way of meaningful choice. The strategic map is pictured below.

The meat of the game seemed to be in the battles, which made bizarre jumps between extremely simplistic, and challenging enough to require multiple tries. There wasn't much telegraphing of what would make for more challenging fights, so often the choices made felt meaningless. This translating to character development as well. There are a large number of seemingly interesting options for character development, but little guidance as to where to go with characters, so many of these choices felt random (because without knowing the math of the game, stats felt fairly flat and meaningless). 

My highlight: Running into a fairly challenging fight which came after being bloodied in another fight, and figuring out a way to control the battlefield and just barely come out on top in spite of being seriously outnumbered. (when this was followed up by another extremely challenging fight(with even more diminished resources and no meaningful way to retreat, I soured to the game a bit)) 

My verdict: Blackguards is a decent turn-based strategy game with RPG elements, but ulitmately I didn't find myself invested in the characters. When frustration set in (as it does with this sort of game) my lack of engagement to the characters or plot made me lose interest in pushing through. I don't strongly recommend this, but I can see the reasons why someone would like it (or why I would have loved it 5 years ago). 

3 hours of Binding of Isaac: Rebirth

The Basics: Roguelike top-down shooter

Previous Time Spent: 1-3 hours

Expectation of learning Curve: medium 

Why I bought this: Positive reviews, word of mouth

First Impressions: My first impressions of this game go back years. I remember finding it very unforgiving, challenging, and grotesque. From the get-go, I liked the simplicity and odd art-direction, and disliked the actual twitch shooting mechanic. I'm not great at that kind of old-school video-game control, and every previous foray led to me quitting out of frustration

.

My 3 hours: I spent 3 hours going through a number of runs of the game. Each time you begin, a map is generated, including a number of rooms. These rooms seem to be fairly static, but the game randomly strings a bunch of rooms together to form a level. The random element is fun, and can be unforgiving, but sometimes really powerful. The meat of the game seems to be dealing with these individual rooms, each of which is filled with enemies that seem to behave in predictable, but varied manners. Fighting is accomplished by moving around and shooting tears out of your eyes to harm enemies, unless altered by a powerup. Every level ends with some kind of boss fight. From my experience, it seemed like the levels increased in difficulty, but the bossfights didn't necessarily follow suit. 

In my 3 hours, the furthest I ended up getting was to level 3 out of 6. Having some rogue-like elements, death leads to restarting from the very beginning in an entirely new world. I ran into a number of pretty cool enemies, and got the hang of the shooting elements a bit. I also learned a bit about what risks were acceptable to take, and started to figure out which powerups were worth taking, etc. All of the powerups seemed flavorful and odd. In the screenshot abover, the main character's face has been warped into a sort of death's masque, allowing him to fire "spectral tears," which pass through solid cover. 

Ultimately, I never got enough of the hang of the game to progress too far, but I could see digging in and really learning these systems. Playing any kind of roguelike, there is an initial learning curve and acceptance phase, and I think I got past that. 

My highlight: My real highlight was the first time I got a really decent powerup, and actually cared about my success. That was my first succesful foray into the lower levels of the game, and I came to appreciate the challenging enemies far more when I had more power to defeat them. 

My verdict: This is a challenging and odd roguelike. It's very good at what it does, and I think that's a measure of success.