f13.net forums - BLOOD BOWL!! Game called "Chaos League" (demo rev

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July 19, 2025, 12:14:10 PM

we're back, baby

Saw this game demo at www.avault.com/pcrl/ late last night after not checking my computer all weekend (it was released on the 21st).

Let me start off by saying my gripes are at the end, prior to that is just discussion of gameplay and features so you can decide if you want to check it out.

Graphics looks passable, and pretty good when zoomed out how you will normally play. Demo is about 160 megs. Don't be scared by the velocity server crap at avault, I have never been anything but 1 of 1 in line at their free servers.

The demo voice is in french, but the text is all translated into english. It is a pretty good translation and only a few words that I have seen were off enough to cause me some momentary confusion (misuse of the word 'default' in place of 'generic' a few times). The voice is just the announcer, and while it sounds fun to have the announcer screaming, even in english I would turn it off around game 4 most likely. As it is, it kind of amuses me because it sounds like a crazy foreign football (soccer) announcer.

So, on to the game itself

This game IS Blood Bowl. Or I should say it is like rugby with fantasy races that throw the ball around and try to kill each other when they don't have the ball. Blood Bowl is not exactly unique in this genre, but this game pegs it pretty soundly. It will satisfy blood bowl urges for sure. The gameplay segment will show the many similarities and differences.

Basic Gameplay and Gameplay modes
Two teams of 9 active players each. Extra sideline players can only come in after a score. The game is setup just like blood bowl basically. Both sides move into position. You have 60 seconds to run players into place, whoever is on the field after that is who you have. There are no setup rules except you cannot have more than 9 players and you cannot cross midfield until the setup time is over. The ball starts on the back of a very unfortunate pig who wanders back and forth in the middle of the field. When the time starts you can assault the pig and you can cross midfield.

This is where the two modes of play come into light. The game is at it's core a realtime game. Think realtime strategy and you just about have the controls. Click your guy or box drag to highlight multiples. Right click to move/block/get the ball/throw the ball, etc... There are a TON of special abilities to use that can be accessed via right clicking the button (hard for me to get used to RIGHT clicking buttons) or by using the keyboard hotkeys (configurable). In this realtime mode the game can be paused, but no orders can be given while paused. This mode will most likely be VERY fun once I get more used to the controls.

For the turn based junkies like me, there is a VERY manageable pseudo turn based mode. The menu shows the options for turnbased as 5/5, 5/10, 5/25, 5/45. The first number is the amount of time the game will run before autopausing. In this mode you CANNOT issue commands while the game is moving. The second number is how long the game pauses for so you can give orders. I have been using 25 while learning the game. This gives me 25 seconds to issue all my orders. I have not found anyway to tell the game that I am done issueing orders and just let the game play out. I don't think that button exists actually. Usually a LOT happens in 5 seconds and I have many new commands or things to think about anyway. This mode is VERY fun for me. You can hold down shift to do waypoints or to queue up basic commands. Like telling your QB to run and get the ball and THEN throw it to the receiver. While at the same time you tell the receiver to run a few steps toward the QB to shorten the pass and THEN bolt for the endzone with speedburst. It works very well once you get used to it, and I actually like it better than full turn based because both sides move at the same time. And in VS human play both sides have the same limitations to the unexpected happening 2 seconds into your brilliant 5 second plan.

More gameplay
So now you are moving people around the board and understand the gameplay modes. Each player has four stats that I forget. Savagery, dexterity, um... speed, um... constitution? Savagery is like Bloodbowl strength with abit of a realtime twist. It controls who will win in a faceoff, but there is also a random element it seems. My mino will sometimes beat a mummy, and other times not. Blocking is done by just highlighting a player and then just right clicking on an opponent. The two players will grapple and start brawling. They are now pretty much tied to each other. Neither can leave the block until they dodge out or one of them falls down. Dodgeing is risky, because if you fail you are treated automatically as if you were defeated by your opponent. Dex controls this, and the big bruisers just don't have any. The more the savagery difference between opponents, the faster the block will be. Two evenly matched foes will spend more time doing the block. The winner knocks down the loser, potentially causing injury or loss of health and surely knocking them out. The duration of the knockout is dependent on how savage the winner was. You can also have people 'assist' like in bloodbowl and they boost the savagery of the primary blocker (the first engaged).

Each player has health and 'breath'. These are bars that show up underneath their portrait and on the gameworld when they are selected. Health is pretty straightforward. Lose all your health and the player is going to the sideline and may suffer a serious injury or possibly even death. There are team medic skills you can buy between games that will get a wounded player back on his feet, but you are limited in how many of these you can use per game.

Breath activates all the active special abilities. Of these there are two categories. Generic, and player specific. Everyone has access to the generic skills. These are:

Sprint (speed burst, pretty self explanitory, once engaged you get a speed boost till your breath runs out)
Power Up (name may be wrong, but it is a melee savagery boost.)
Hide (this is pretty cool, takes only half your breath, and puts up a 'cloud of war' type poof of smoke at the players current location that dissipates over time. The opponent cannot see your units in this fog. The exception is that they can ALWAYS see where the ball is. This is SUPER useful even vs the computer, but the computer will use it against you as well.)
Self Heal (need a full wind bar, but will fully heal your health bar)
Pump up the crowd (this raises your crowd meter, more on this later)

There may be others I have forgotten. You can't use these powers or the player specific ones while in a block.

Player special powers
Active player special powers work much like the default ones listed above. They take a full breath meter and activate some spell. Different teams and different positions have access to different ones as they get experience for injuries, scores, catches, throws, etc... These are quite varied. Ranging from aimed fireball spells to heals, to abilities to let another player immediately get up from a knockout....

There are also a TON of passive skills. Most barbarians have frenzy for instance. This means that for every consecutive 'win' they have blocking they become more and more savage making it easier to win the next block. Any failure takes them back down to base level though. There are skills that boost active skills, like one that makes sprint last longer, another that makes sprint faster, etc... There are silly ones like plastic surgery that make you look better on merchandise so you bring in more income to your team. There are the brutal ones that increase the damage you do when you knock down an opponent... In just glancing at them there seemed to be about 20+ skills available just on the passive side to any given barbarian player. Other teams may have more or less, I don't know.

The crowd
Each team can buy cheerleaders to boost the crowd participation in the game. Cheerleaders also boost the money you get after a match. The crowd participation is a meter that goes up as you do good things. Like scoring, or wounding, etc... It also jumps up in chunks if you use your players default active skills of pumping up the crowd. As the meter fills up you get access to some nasty sideline abilities. Six in all that unlock in batches of 2 as the meter rises. You can temporarily hide all your players from the enemy, you can plant MINES on the field that blow up when anyone enters the radius (only you can see it though), you can curse players to make them fail almost all of their actions for a limited duration, you can call down lightning to smite large groups of friend and foe alike.

Crazy stuff that can massively change the game. A surething touchdown does not stay a surething when you can plant a mine in his path. Anytime you use one of these skills the meter goes back to nothing and you need to build it up again.

I compare these to the sideline wizards in the bloodbowl expansion. They just need crowd support to get them going.

You can also pay off some "hooligans" before a match if you want to. They will randomly throw stuff onto the field at the opponents. Harmless stuff like swords and bombs.

The Ref
These games always have to have a ref it seems. As usual he can be bribed. Before the game you decide how many ref bribes you are going to pay for in advance. You then use these right before you decide to do something illegal. Like gang up on and beat up someone who is on the ground.

The races
I am going to forget some here...
Human
High elf
Dwarf
Barbarian
Ork
Goblin
Undead
Praetorian (think skaven/catmen)
Dark Elf

The demo
The demo has two playable races, Barbarians and Undead. And three game modes. Tutorial is a several part ingame totorial teaching you how to do things from simple movement to using your active powers. The next mode is Match, playable in realtime or turn based. All you can play are the barbarians or the undead here, and only pre-made teams. The next demo mode is Championship. You can again only play the barbarians or undead, but you can now make your own team, and you can play AGAINST all the other races in the game throughout your season. Injuries and money flow from game to game, I don't have much details as I have only played two games so far in this mode. Match and championship are both playable turn based or realtime in any of four different difficulty levels.

Gripes
Pretty minor, but I am pretty new to the game. Sometimes I find it hard to tell if there will be a delay before my activating a power and it firing off. I am not sure what the reason for this is yet. maybe they are powers that need full breath and they are a pixel short when I activate them or something.

In turn based mode, the computer is actually playing realtime in 5 second snippets. The computer can react to something that happened in the second second and then has a three second headstart toward a fumbled ball for instance. Learning to queue up commands with shift has helped a LOT though. I can tell someone to grab the ball AND throw it to a player so they don't stand there like an idiot with the ball fro 3 seconds.

I wish I could toggle AI for grabbing any ball near you on a per person basis. It seems abit hit or miss who will get the ball. Anyone standing RIGHT on the ball will try and pick it up even if you don't tell them to, which can be annoying when I am moving a blocker over to hit someone, and my passer over to grab the ball... often the blocker will get blocked into the ball and then end up picking it up just to fumble it in the block.

Combining the two above, it is nearly impossible for me to do a good job of getting the ball thrown out of a mob centered on the ball. I just can't tell who will get it so I end up having to assign the grab ball and throw queue to everyone. Not a huge deal.

Still learning the ropes. If you like bloobowl, GRAB THIS DEMO though. See if you like it yourself.

I'll have to check it out some day, I still play the Blood Bowl tabletop sometimes, aswell as the original computer game.

Its pretty darn fun and the demo actually is pretty full featured. No multiplayer in demo but you can play a campaign which allows you to make your team from scratch either undead/barbarian and play through a full season with your players skilling up.

It is a very good blood bowl translation feel while remaining its own game and throwing in some spice with the player powers that probably would be to over powering in the board game where you can plot your moves alot easier.

The player powers often work to help balance off player errors where you screwed up grabbed the wrong person and let some zombie shamble towards the endzone. You can get a number of skills to help slow down/mess up breakaways of that nature.

The turn based mode works well and I also played the first three games season games vs the computer in real time and I held my own. Like blood bowl it plays more like and alternate version of australian rules rugby than foot ball and it is quite amusing.

The various tactics from blood bowl work pretty well here as well. Some teams just are not great scorers but are really great at maiming their opponents. The undead team with their cheepish mummies can do really horrible icky things if they are willing to beat you with the mummies and let the junk skeletons foul you. Even with three alts I one time got out of a game with only 7 of the 9 total people you can have on the pitch still in the game.

Some teams are great scorers and for them some of the tactic is mobiliity just keep your team fluid and only engage the monsters when you have no choice and when you do have your hitters go in with a couple assists. I was doing that with the barbarians and was able to keep a pair of mummies away from my weaker folks pretty well.

For myself I find the damn french soccer hooligan announcers funny because they are so spastic it fits with the game. GOAAAAAAALLLLIE GOOOOOOOAAL!

Kaid

One thing I forgot to note is the way they do breath works very well in the game. Sure your players can have some really vicious powers but nearly all of the powers take a full bar of breath. This means if you use one you will not be able to (master power, which gives a bonus edge in hth combat), Hide, pump up the crowd, sprint or heal for a good while. So while they are very useful they have a built in drawback that makes them a very tactical choice of when or if to use them.

The AI so far seems quite good about not cheating blatently as some sports games do. If you are using some line backers like I do to keep up the fog of war around some key areas of the field the ai appears to be hindered as much as you are by theirs.

For most powers there also seems to be counters. There is a fan power called scanner that allows you to keep a specific area of the field visable regardless of fog of war.

If you folks like blood bowl I would deffinatly recommend that you give the demo a whirl it is head/shoulders/ogres above the craptastic blood bowl pc game that came out a while back.

Kaid

I actually had the fortune to talk to one of the developers of that game.
I asked him if Games Workshop was difficult to work with.
His response: They were... problematic. He did not get into more detail. He also mentioned the programmers assigned to the project were not exactly the top tier kind..

But thanks for the information on this game. I might give it a whirl.

Quote from: Jain Zar

I actually had the fortune to talk to one of the developers of that game.

You mean the original official blood bowl pc game, right? I pirated that one back in the day and even though I LOVE blood bowl, I could not play that piece of crap. This from a guy who is known to play the Java bloodbowl game vs himself for hours.

Chaos League is all the fun without the suck.

The English/UK demo should be out in a few weeks as well and by popular demand they have already added an option to pause and assign orders to the RTS version of the game (when played single player), so that will be my new single player mode of choice.

They are also adding a way to skip the paused timer so you can speed up the turn based game if you are in a situation where you don't need much time. The current game forces you to wait the full 15-45 seconds (depending on settings) every single turn even if you are only assigning one command. The next demo will let you set your 'think time' to 45 seconds and then just hit "OK" after 2 seconds if that is all you needed. I hated waiting so much that I would play the 15 second mode, but early in the round 15 seconds is cutting it TIGHT to assign detailed commands to 9 players. Later on when half of them are on the ground and more are in battle it gets easier and I still find myself waiting for the timer. Glad to see they were able to quickly add one of those 'no brainer' things players were asking for.

I looked up the developer, and they are the same guys who made "Savage", so they are not quite as no-name as I thought.

Oh hehe found out you cannot play the full season you can only play 3 weeks on the demo but it does give you a good feel for how the game season works.

Also the season lets you see alot of the teams at least as they are used against you.

Note to those who play if you are against wood elves keep people back they are very good throwers and good catchers.

kaid

This is a lot of writing, can someone just give me a yes or no answer on this.

Is it fun?

Yes it is very fun. If you have ever played mutant league football or blood bowl you will love the game. Even if you havn't its a blast its very well done and quite amusing. I am not one to play many demos but I have played the chaos leage demo with pretty much all the teams it offers and I am still enjoying it and looking forward to buying it.

Match play is fun but I really enjoy the season when you take your group of rookies and watch them develop and gain skills.

kaid

The english version of this demo has been released today with english speaking comentators for those who did not like the french version.

http://www.chaosleaguegame.com/

Same demo but with a few changes such as the ability to issue orders when paused in real time mode.

Kaid

Awesome. This is the first incarnation of a Blood Bowl game that I've ever played and so far I'm fairly impressed (never did table top gaming outside some AD&D in college).

I can't get a handle on how to really play with the undead. So I tried the barbarians actually won a game fairly handily vs some night elves (made the motivation to win more palpable). 3 linebackers, 3 linemen, 2 recievers, and 2 QBs makes for only one sub, but at least their roles are more easily defined and just about anyone can break free for a touchdown.

I still don't get the game completely. For some reason I can't figure out how to use the team doctor (guess I'll have to play that part of the tutorial again). Also, I guess your QB can't lead a reciever that's running a route, they just seem to throw to the reciever's current spot a the moment you tell them to throw. But at least I'm setting up blocking better and playing a little better defense. Still sucks when your defender gets bowled over when they're the last one to beat.

Real time with pausing + command issueing should speed up the game considerably. I think it took about an hour or so to complete a game on 5/25 pausing. This would be really killer multiplayer in turn based mode (might be too annoying with real time and pausing).

Anyhow, thanks for pointing this out. I may just buy the retail version when it hits.

The team doctor is only usable I think when players go unconcious with the red cross symbol. When that happens right click on one of your team doctor icons then right click on the player to heal them.

Frankly with barbarians and undead I rarely if ever use it once I learned how to use the heal power all players have.

Undead are much much MUCH more of a brawling team than barbarians are. One advantage undead have is they always get 3 to 5 free junk skeletons. These are not on your official roster but they are there and you can use them to great effect fouling the heck out of downed players. This gives you a great number of cheep shots and I have flat killed 2 or 3 folks from barbarian teams in one game using it. If they get thrown out its not a big deal you can sub in another when the next score happens.

Basically for undead do not try for fancy passing plays their agility SUCKS they can't throw well and they catch worse. They are however very durable and many players get an ability that lets them regain breath as fast in combat as out. This means you can use any specials they have more, heal more or use master power for tilting combats more. Also the undead bigfoot the mummy is I think half the price of the barbarians mino a very good deal indeed. Its alot easier to get multiple mummies than it is muli minos.

As in blood bowl teams play differently and somebody who is great playing dwarves may have HUGE problems with playing elves as they are just completly different styles.

Also one thing to note about undead is that their units are much more diverse and specialized. Most barbarians have pretty equal stats across the board and I find my line backers pick up the ball nearly as well as runners inititally. Undead have the big slow bruisers like mummies and skeletal warriors and some what more agile and a bit faster recievers the zombies and the very fast very fragile ghouls. They require a bit more concentration about what each unit should be used for to get the best out of them.

I myself find both barbs and undead very good I played the league last night with undead to try the fouling trick and the disposable skellies + 4 team bribes equals very amusing and a lot of dead opponents.

edit

Funny fact to get kicked out for fouling the ref actually has to get up to the player. If you are on a scoring drive and the ref is at the far end of the field and you are pretty sure you will go in for the td any player on the other side of the field can pretty much foul like crazy as long as you score before the ref gets to you.

Ya so I am a dirty player and like kicking people when they are down sue me.

kaid

Regarding the paused turn based mode:

The new US/UK demo and the final release version have an OK button you can press when you are done making your moves so you don't have to wait the full 25 seconds. The same OK button you have during the 60 second setup phase at the beginning of the game. This will make turnbased multiplayer far less painful. Your opponent CAN still use the full time, but you can bitch at them to hurry up at least, heh.

The pausable rts version will be solo play only. Sort of like how NWN does not allow pausing in multiplayer. It would just get paused too often I think in multiplayer.

Only real nitpick I have now is I wish there was a more freeform camera mode. Maybe there is, but I have not found it yet. I also find bribing the ref and team doctor difficult to use in turn based. These are easy in rts, but they don't give very good positive feedback when you have done it right. So I end up doing it right and then messing it up both in the same pause period so the end result is that it does not fire off. It has been brought up on the forums and the dev contact has said they are making the feedback for powers more intuitive. We will see.

Looking forward to the multiplayer demo which will come out in a month or so I think.

Hmm.. I downloaded the US/UK demo and there's no OK to press during the 25 second pause time. So, I still find myself sitting around doing nothing at times.

To change camera modes, hit the "C" in the upper left of the screen. It helps sometimes when you're having trouble seeing the ball.

The US demo I dl'd still has some problems. The screen froze up once after finishing a game on the screen right before it dumps you back to the team menu. It just wouldn't let me click through to the next screen. Sucked, had to CAD it and lose the entire game I just played.

Game wise, it's great. I'm having some problems however leveling my linebackers and linemen. I tried fouling some to get injury stats, but I get caught every time. Is there a secret to avoid getting redcarded beyond bribes?

I've found that the barbs are really good for scoring. Their speed makes for great passing and running plays. Just about anyone on the team can score. However, without being able to afford a mino yet, they get kind of beat up by more physical teams.

Fun game. I'll most likely buy it. If they support it (patch annoying bugs), I can imagine playing this for a while (tons of replay value).

Tried out the demo, not bad at all, didn't crash on me. I think I'll get the one with the english announcers. I usually don't play any sports games unless they've got an unusual premise such as this one does. I wonder how many of the sports games these days have adopted a real time strategy-like interface.

There is a free java-based bloodbowl game out. It doesn't look like much, but it's fun, fuctional, and network-playable. Wish i could remember what it's called. I'll try to dig it out.

Yeah, I have that one as well, but I find this a very good adaptation of bloodbowl graphically.

What I would really love to see is someone at Visual Concepts (the sega sports guys since 2000, not sure WHAT they are now after sega is sold) to branch off and take the previous year's ESPN football title and go and remake Mutant League Football with modern graphical technology. I would kill for that game.

Since that is not happening, I want abit more than 16x16 sprites for the players. I also like being able to play the computer. I also have the underdogs copy of the original Blood Bowl game released. Chaos league is different and very fun. I don't really want to label it better or worse. The java game was good for what it intended to accomplish.

Chaos league is a good middle ground. Sort of bloodbowl with RTS controls. It works for me since you only have 9 players to worry about, and the turn based mode is well done. Graphics should be abit better IMO, but I imagine it does not take much of a system to run it, that will be a plus for many.

Yeah, it was to facilitate matches between players. If you want to play by yourself you have to play both teams. Still fun though. It's kinda neat to go all out for both sides to see which one comes out on top.