I can't think of a game in which it's more enjoyable to lose than Blood Bowl. When you're 3-0 down inside the second half, the dice are forever against you and the chance of a consolatory touchdown seems increasingly slim, there is always a strategy you can turn to that will rekindle your appreciation for the Orwellian sporting spirit: violent conduct. Not the whiney-bitey nonsense we've seen from the likes of Suarez and Costa, more the kind of full-blooded assault demonstrated by Harald Schumacher (no relation) in the 1982 World Cup semi-final, after which the unrepentant West German goalkeeper, since dubbed the Butcher of Seville, briefly beat Hitler into second place as the most hated man in France.
Of course, being a synergy of gridiron football and turn-based fantasy wargaming, in Blood Bowl you can go one better than shoulder charge the opposition and have them stretchered from the pitch. You can roll the bones and stamp on their heads after they're down, or bundle them over the sideline and get the crowd to do your dirty work for you. It's a risky strategy to pursue, to be sure, one that might result in an even more humiliating scoreline and a sending off or two, but there are payoffs beyond the fact that you'll be taking your frustrations out on your opponent. Assuming you're successful at reducing the effectiveness of a couple of the opposition - or, even better, ending their careers prematurely - you be giving the other teams a useful advantage when they'd be lining up against replacement rookies. That is, if you're playing in a league with your closest internet chums, which is where Blood Bowl 2 shines the brightest, with it's customisable ladders, knockout competitions and transfer windows. If however you're playing the campaign (which, as a newcomer, you likely will be), you might instead lash out purely to offset the perpetually annoying and deeply unfunny commentary.
With its crass cultural cross-referencing and nose-picking humour, the lines of your studio hosts, Jim and Bob, wouldn't be quite so insufferable if they weren't so repetitive and poorly cued. If you thought an arrow to the knee was overdone in Skyrim, just wait until you've been served the line about halflings on a sandwich for the third time in a row. The best that be said of the vocal work is that technically it's an improvement on the original game, but if it wasn't for the odd audio levels in some parts of a match - birdsong over a mass of visibly fervent fans, for example - you'd likely turn the speech right down and never bother with it again.
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