Blood Bowl: Star Coach

[luckton]

Wait, what?  This popped up on my Steam RSS feeder out of no where.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/221120/


Also, it's free to play.

[rk47]

Wow

[IainC]

:cyanide:

[HaemishM]

I downloaded it but haven't booted it up yet. I'm having a hard time figuring out what it is. It's basically the Blood Bowl team creation with a bit more coaching depth added but without actually having to play the games?

[Ingmar]

I downloaded it but haven't booted it up yet. I'm having a hard time figuring out what it is. It's basically the Blood Bowl team creation with a bit more coaching depth added but without actually having to play the games?

Gratuitous Blood Bowl Battles, as far as I can tell. Haven't tried it yet.

[IainC]

I tried it and I have to say that rarely have I seen any entertainment product as horrible as this excreted onto an unsuspecting world. Holy shit it's bad. For a start it's hilariously broken, every time you do anything that requires a server call the game minimises and logs you out. Assuming that you stick with it, you are treated to a UI design that is as incoherent as the English translations used. Clicking on help minimises the game and takes you to the Cyanide website because LUA is hard I guess.

Anyhow I made a team and for no good reason this doesn;t use the same mechanics as the actual BB game. You have to hire exactly 7 players, no more, no less regardless of starting race. They can level up and stuff but when you hire new ones or buy Star players you need to fire an existing player. Teams are the same as in LE as far as I could see and you can't just type in a name for your team either, you pick one adjective and one noun from pregenerated lists. How do you fuck that part up? Once you have a team you can set an offensive and a defensive strategy although I have no idea what these do as there is no explanation or any kind of feedback. Then you can challenge people You have five challenges and once they are made you have nothing more to do so you may as well log out and go do something else. I have no idea what happens next. I challenged some guys and timers appeared on their names but apart from that I don't seem to have done anything. I certainly haven't played any games.

It's just bad. Avoid it.

[IainC]

Here's a video of someone else wrestling with the game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=XO579hX1Jbk#!

[Jasper]

Another reminder of how amazing it is that Cyanide's Blood Bowl is actually mostly playable.

[Falconeer]

I understand this is bad, but isn't it some sort of Football/Championship Manager, only with Blood Bowl? The idea is interesting to me. Although I understand they completely bothed execution. Too bad.

[z22]

If this was an updated version of Playmaker Football (1989?), set in the Blood Bowl universe it would be cool. I loved PMF.

[HaemishM]

Thank you for that video. Holy... fucking... shit. I didn't think it was possible for Cyanide to make a worse, more inscrutable interface for a game than Blood Bowl but they exceeded my wildest nightmares. That looks like a raging dumpster fire on a slow motion trainwreck.

Uninstalled.

[Modern Angel]

This is amazingly bad. Shockingly bad. It's not even a game. There's no interaction with the match. It simulates the match (three "turns" only) in the fucking background. The only option you have is to watch the replay.

Honestly, no hyperbole, I don't think I've ever played something on the PC this bad. At the least, I can't think of anything. This is the sort of thing that gets a license yanked bad, so we'd all better hope that there's no clause for that and that GW aren't paying much attention. This is shocking. And they're going to monetize the shit out of it, too.

Falc: I would climb over my dead family to get to a FM style BB simulator. This is sooooooo not that game.

[HaemishM]

If it wasn't for the stunning inability of GW to put out decent computer games, I'd be all for Cyanide getting their license yanked. The UI in BB is SO GODDAMN BAD, I'd like to think no one could do worse. Then I remember it's a GW product so yes, they most definitely could.

[Modern Angel]

I actually didn't find the UI in Star Coach THAT bad. What I found galling was that I set up my games (multiple; your team can be in five games at the same time because OH FUCK IT WHY NOT) and waited. And waited. And I see these timers ticking down and it dawns on me that, oh god, the games were being played. In the background, with nothing I can see or interact with. Then it said REPLAY, so I hit yes, and there's this awful simulacrum of a BB match and oh god.

I've never seen anything quite like this. People should feel bad for this. Steam should look at this and yank it.

[IainC]

I logged back in to see if I'd actually managed to play any games. All of my challenges had apparently timed out but I had four incoming challenges. Great Success! So I accepted all of them, saw the 2 minute timer start on each and the notification log said that all the matches were ongoing. Then I waited. And waited. And waited some more. Well maybe it isn't refreshing properly so I logged out and back in again. Oh, none of those games apparently happened after all, I still have a 0/0/0 WDL record, no matches in progress.

Fucking awesome. A+ job.

Also, this game is very obviously designed for tablets, there are no options at all, no quit button (you need to press escape to close the game) and the controls are clearly designed for touchscreens.

[rk47]

This game hurts the brand more than anything.
I've said this before, if this isn't a Bloodbowl game - I wouldn't give it a second look.
A newcomer to the franchise would be turned off completely from even trying the real game.