Blood Bowl 2 is a fantasy football game, and I don’t mean fantasy like, “who are you going to draft this season?” It’s more like, “this orc is punching my face in really hard” fantasy. Part of the fun of the Blood Bowl franchise is the players play rough. Some strategies in the game involve outright killing your opponent’s team since it’s a lot harder to run with the ball if they are… you know… dead.
That being said, a whole new playable race will be joining the Blood Bowl 2 roster on May 3rd. The Norse armies of the frozen wastes of Norsca are lending their players to the pitch to wreck havoc among the other teams.
Another change includes a revamp to the matchmaking system, which currently is set up where players join a league and then search for an opponent who is close to their player’s stat level manually. The update will also feature a number of bug fixes, and new Starplayers, who are characters recognized in the Blood Bowl universe as particularly skilled or otherwise dangerous individuals.
The Norse will be a returning playable race from the previous iteration of Blood Bowl, and the above screenshot showcases one of their unique race characters: the Norse Werewolf, or “Ulfwerener”. Norse have typically been one of the more violent races in Blood Bowl, preferring to knock out their opponents instead of actually running with the ball, and they typically have a lower armor value than most brawler races.
They do have fairly inexpensive units, however, and can get to be pretty fierce if you level them up correctly. A good choice for someone who thinks the Human race spends a little too much time actually trying to play the game instead of just bashing out their opponent’s brains.
The release of the Norse marks the first of four announced DLC classes coming to Blood Bowl, all of which were previously confirmed as free for players who already own the game. The other three races will be the Undead, Nurgle, and Necromantic teams, planned to be released one after the other on a regular basis.
It should be noted the Norse were originally slated for release late February 2016. There is no word yet as to when the other races are scheduled for release. The game is also 75% off for Xbox One players who don’t already own it, until April 25th.
