|
Chess is for dorks!... or you can look at it in another way - Chess is for people who are smart enough to understand the rules and tactics. Battle Chess is for a broader audience, because it adds a bit more action into this brain-game by letting the pieces on the board fight it out for real, instead of just sliding of the board.
To play Battle Chess you have still got to know the rules of the game of course. You can choose between black or white (or actually blue and red in this game!) and then it’s time to play! Battle Chess can be played against the computer; there are 7 difficulty levels to play against, so there’s chess-action for the rookie as well as the chess-champion! It’s also possible to play against a friend in two player mode.
You start with the basic set-up of the game, but you can also set up the pieces on the board anyway you like, so you can put yourself in real match-situations in which Carpov and Casparov and the like were, if you wish. You can save your game whenever you want, so you can play on later. During play you can always take back a move, if you aren’t satisfied with the result or if you are stuck and you don’t know what to do, you can always ask the computer to suggest a move.
The graphics in Battle Chess are pretty good, but not superb. The characters are well defined and are instantly recognizable from a glance, but because the characters are the same colour as the squares of the board (red and blue), they sometimes tend to get a little bit obscure. Also the blockiness causes things to get a bit hard to see, especially when there are a couple of chess-pieces of the same colour near each other.
The sound effects in Battle Chess are fine - they consist of blips and beeps, which sound a bit poor at times, but they still add something to the game.
The graphics and sound aren't excellent, but the overall humour and fun which is displayed in front of your eyes is great. This chess game contains an awful lot of viewing pleasure, especially the battle animations, which are great to look at and contain bundles of humour! This makes the brain-game of chess much more accessible for people who otherwise weren't enticed to go and sit behind the chess-board.
BUT… there’s one big problem with Battle Chess on the C64- it's too damn slow! Every move which is made has to be loaded and it takes some considerable time before the action you ordered is performed on-screen. The battles between the chess-pieces take even longer to load, so the fun of watching the nice fighting-scenes, becomes rather irritating pretty fast. Add to that, when you’ve seen all the different battles between all the different characters, seeing them a second or a third time is less fun, so the fights tend to get pretty tedious. The diehard chess-fan can always switch the 3D-battle-view to the slightly faster 2D-view which also gives a better overview of the game, although quite a lot of disk-swapping is necessary for this.
All in all, the concept of Battle Chess is very nice, and it adds a lot of fun and humour to the mind-game called chess, but the execution is a bit disappointing unfortunately. Especially the long loading times with every move you make, is something which takes a lot of pleasure out of an otherwise very original chess-game.
|
|
|
|
| GRAPHICS - 7/10 |
Graphically Battle Chess is okay. The chess-pieces are nicely designed and the animation is very humorous. The sameness in colour between pieces and between pieces and the board can make things a bit blurry at times.
| | SOUND - 7/10 |
The sound in Battle Chess contains some blips and beeps, which do add to the fun of the game, but they are not that special.
| | PLAYABILITY - 6/10 |
Battle Chess is in general just a game of chess. The fair number of difficulty-levels and the addition of some nice options make this a rather good chess game for the average chess-player. But, this game's playability suffers a lot from the long loading times. These make the very slow and pretty tedious at times.
| | OVERALL - 6/10 |
With Battle Chess, Interplay wanted to make chess accessible for a broader audience and they did that with a fair amount of success. The addition of the fighting-scenes makes this a very funny chess game, which will appeal to many. Without the animation, there’s still a pretty good chess-game here, with some good options and quite a lot of difficulty-levels. Unfortunately, the humour and originality of Battle Chess is let down by very long loading times (and disk-swapping in places), which can be taken at first, but which become irritating in the long run.
|
|
| COVER |
.jpg&w=206)
|
|
|
; "Click to zoom!")
; "Click to zoom!")
