Blood Bowl 3 gets Shambling Undead team, and a sizeable patch

Each new season of fantasy football parody Blood Bowl 3 promises a new Blood Pass and a new team that can either be unlocked by paying for said Blood Pass or earning your way up to the top of its free tier. The first season's team, the Lizardmen, were given away for free, while the subsequent teams—the Underworld Denizens and now the Shambling Undead—will cost you either time or money.

The Shambling Undead will be familiar to players of the previous Blood Bowls, where they were simply called the "Undead". Presumably the new name helps differentiate them from the Vampires and Necromantic teams, though there's nothing shambling about a ghoul pissbolting into your endzone. The Shambling Undead also feature mummies, high-strength blockers who don't suffer from weaknesses like stupidity or a tendency to put down literal roots like a lot of equivalent big guys do, and wights, who make solid blitzers. The rest of the roster is filled out with skeletons and zombies, cheap chaff whose main benefit is their resilience.

The Shambling Undead are a top-tier team, but whether you think they're worth forking out 1,000 warpstone to get via the Blood Pass is another matter. Last season's Underworld Denizens are now available minus Blood Pass in the in-game shop for 750 warpstone, so it might be worth waiting for a price drop if you don't want care about the cosmetics that make up the rest of the Blood Pass's value. (Undead cheerleaders are level 35, so we'll see if I have the patience to get that far just to earn some skeletons with pom-poms.)

Season 3's accompanying patch also added statistics pages and reworked the UI for the inducement phase, as well as adding the Multiple Block skill and four star players: Grim Ironjaw, Horkon Heartripper, Bryce Cambuel, and Ivan Deathshroud. It also added a concede penalty that temporarily bans players from queuing if they give up too often, which will hopefully cut down on how frequently that happens.

The full patch notes mention "Various AI improvements" and a long list of bugfixes, but I'm still yet to see the AI attempt a single pass or present any kind of a challenge, and I'm getting disconnected on the final turn of matches on the regular. Though at least I get the full amount of Blood Pass rewards for completing those matches, which is something.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.