Ahh Blood Bowl, if you like the table top game you'll love this, if you like warhammer you might like this, otherwise...
Blood Bowl like all Warhammer games is turn based strategy, which relies on dice rolling to determine the success or failure of actions taken in your turn. This dice rolling adds a certain amount of chaos to the gameplay, especially as failing certain actions like passing the ball or getting knocked down mean the end of your turn. Each game of Blood Bowl is divided into two halves of 16 turns each, 8 for you and 8 for your opponent. In your turn you can "block" and opposing player with one of your players if they are standing next to each other (for block read punch), you can move players upto their movement limit, pass the ball or "Blitz", blitzing is tactically important and you can only do it once per turn, a blitz is where you move and block or block and move. Each of your players has skills which assist in the above actions and when they complete certain actions successfully they get star player points, enough points and they level up and can pick a new skill.... You get the idea. Blood bowl is actually very involved and I couldn't possibly explain all the gameplay mechanics in a short review.
Now I said Blood Bowl the computer game is a fairly faithful recreation of the table top game, and it is just that in every respect, except that there are elements of the table top game missing, which is a shame as this does detract from the experience of the whole game. What is missing? well i've already mentioned that some of the races are missing but thats not such a big deal, many of the star players are missing and a lot of the more subtle elements like the ability to buy special plays or many of the inducements and the weather effects. Anyway, the core of the game is intact.
The game itself features a campaign, where you choose a race and create a team from scratch, playing them though several contests and working your way up the rankings, this is the bulk of the game in single player. There is the ability to play over the internet by joining an online league where you can pitch your custom made team against other people's teams, and there are also LAN and hotseat modes. Sadly it isn't possible to play a campaign in hotseat which would be a nice addition for old Blood Bowl players like myself, in hotseat mode you can only pick one of several pre-created teams for each race for a one-off match.
Is it a good game? Its blood Bowl :D of course it is. But if you're new to blood bowl or even new to games workshop/warhammer then it is going to take a bit of perseverance and reading of the rule book to make sense of, because the computer game is such a faithful recreation of the table top this does mean that to really get to grips with what's going on and what is tactically good and not you will need to read and understand the table top rule book (available as PDF).
In summary this is a blood bowl players dream (with some niggles note above) but the developer could have done more, the graphics are ok but fairly basic, a variety of animations of blocks and injuries would have been welcome, plus the commentary very quickly gets repetitive. Also the game is quite expensive for what it is, although if you are a blood bowl fan you will get dozens if not hundreds of hours gameplay for your money (i'm over 70 hours currently and still going strong).
In answer to some of the complaints of poor AI - its really not that bad, although the AI does have some strategic deficiencies e.g. it pays no attention to what turn it is, so if its the last turn in a half and its impossible to score it will still play the ball when it should just be blocking or dodging, similarly if its the last turn of the match it won't make that risky play that could score it a TD but instead builds up another play which will take a few turns to work out.... Also it fairly often takes unnecessary risks e.g. dodging out of a tackle zone only to go right back in to another tackle zone on the same player with no tactical difference. On the whole though its very playable, the AI isn't perfect but to be fair its better, if less flamboyant than most human opponents I've played.
In answer to those who complain of rigged dice... they aren't, I've played the table top, i've played the computer game (70+ hrs) and i've seen no noticeable difference. Thats just the way blood bowl plays out, its based around odds on 6 sided dice, that makes for chaotic results, and that people, is Blood Bowl.