Report #56

One of the two oldest unfinished games in my library, Blood Bowl is a turn-based strategic sports game. Set in the fantasy Warhammer universe, about two dozen different teams compete to become Blood Bowl champion. Blood Bowl is like American Football just more violent. From Orcs to Chaos to Elves, every faction of the Warhammer universe fields its own team with a unique roster of players.

I suspect that the game already was a bit old-school when it was released, and it definitely shows it's age nowadays. However, since its gameplay does not rely on flashy graphics, it really doesn't matter too much. I last played the game in 2012 and was really stumped. I did not understand a thing. So when picking it up again, I first read a bit about it and with some of the advice taken from guides I was quickly able to learn the basics of the game this time. The amount of different teams to choose from is overwhelming at first, but there are basically two ways to play the game: fast passing-games (think Elves) or slow tackling-oriented tactics (think Orcs). I choose the latter and after losing a couple of games I slowly got the hang of it and had moderate success with the Orcs in the remaining games I played.

I had a surprising amout of fun with it judging by my less ideal first impression I got in 2012 and my overall lack of interest in sports. I wouldn't really recommend the game though, because there's already Blood Bowl 2 out (and BB 3 coming).

Evil Genius is a base building management game, where you try to take over the whole world as an evil genius. The game does not take itself too serious and is rather funny. If you want an impression of the atmosphere of the game, think of the Austin Powers movies and imagine you're playing as Dr. Evil.

I was gifted the game in 2013, but really didn't get into it back then. Unfortunately (other than with Blood Bowl and Fable) I didn't really enjoy it this time either. The basic concept however sounds good. Building up a base from where you start your operations to subjugate the world. You have to train new and different types of minions, research better equipment and defend your base against intruding agents of good. This part is not perfect but decent fun.

In a second part of the game you control your minions on a world map, where they can fulfill mission, steal money to finance your operations or recruit additional minions. In my opinion this part is horrible. Your minions take forever to travel from your base to their missions, in which almost always most of the minions die, so that you have to retrain them. Which can take a long time with the more advanced minion types. And you cannot let your minions simply stay on the world map because they will quickly be rooted out by the agents of the different "good" world powers. Which leads to micromanaging two different aspects of the game in parallel and in realtime. And a lot of stupid waiting in between to retrain minions.

In conclusion: Great concept with good ideas and many funny details. But the execution lacks. I wouldn't want to replay it.

Fable is a third-person action RPG. It's an absolute classic and I guess most of you have at least heard of it.

I spent a ton of time on this game already, but have never gotten really far into it. I don't exactly know why this is the case. This time I was finally able to push through and finish it. And I really enjoyed my playthrough. Although Fable isn't the longest game it features a suprising amount of very modern ingredients: There are collectibles, ingame games, romance, you can buy houses (and even rent them out), align yourself with evil or good, get a new haircut or even some tatoos. Leveling up, quick travel, quests…every "meta" aspect of the game is handled very well too. And the best part: It still looks quite fine for its age, which I attribute to it's cartoonish art style.

Fable may not have invented each of the aforementioned things (a game historian might be able to tell you more about that than I do), but I think it has to be one of the first games that integrated everything so well into it's gameplay. Everything is there, but in moderation. Everything can be done, but you mostly don't have to use e.g. romance or renting out stuff. You are very free to play the game the way you want, the story is almost linear though.