Combat Chess Review

If you're a casual player who wants the option to see some action with your chess game, then it's not a bad purchase.

The modern-day computer is a wonderful medium for games. It allows you to experience things you could never experience in real life, such as fighting the battle of Waterloo or coaching the Bulls through an entire season. The things you can experience in real life, such as card and family board games, tend to feel flat on a computer. Other than providing solo play or easily finding players over the Internet, there's really no benefit with a computer translation. Computers work best in exploiting the imagination, something not needed in a game of hearts.

Throughout the years, companies have tried to entice people into playing traditional games on the computer. One of the most common novelties was to add nudity to the game. Another novelty was video; for example, when playing Battleship you can actually watch your vessel sink. In 1988 Interplay tried to spice up chess with Battle Chess. In it the pieces were animated and actually fought for a square. A decade later someone at Empire Interactive apparently thought the gaming public needed an updated version. Thus Combat Chess was born.

Combat Chess, like it's predecessor, is simply a chess game with animated pieces. From a purely aesthetic point of view it succeeds wonderfully. The animation for each piece is stunning. Movement of each piece from the dragonlike pawns to the regal bishops is fluid and a joy to watch. Even more impressive is the battle animation when the pieces clash. A great example is the black bishop who sears the flesh off the enemy with a bolt of energy from an overhead cloud. The sound effects that go along with the carnage are for the most part good. The Six Million Dollar Man effect when the knights move could have been left out of the game though. OK, so it looks and sounds good. How does it play?

The chess engine itself is adequate, giving a casual player a good opponent. There's also a slew of options for tweaking the engine to suit your play style. These include setting the computer's strength, how much processing power it will use, and how long it takes to contemplate the move. Other amenities include several tutorials on playing chess, the ability to create your own tutorials, setting up the board to re-create famous matches, and being able to load PGN files from other chess programs. There are also the usual mutliplayer options including serial, modem, IPX, and TCP/IP. The manual states that there is a lobby server at Empire's home page to find other players, but at the current time it is not up. Sadly there is no PBEM option, which would have been welcomed.

Even though the engine is decent, Combat Chess suffers from a large problem: The battle animation is simply a novelty, which wears thin rather quickly. This is especially bad when one considers that it's the entire raison d'être for this game. The first few times you play Combat Chess you'll find yourself enraptured with watching the pieces make their moves. By the fourth time you'll realize you've seen about everything there is to see. You'll pay more attention to the 2D board than the 3D animated board. Around the seventh time of playing you'll switch over to the alternate chess set, which is just a standard Staunton set. When the tenth game rolls around you'll realize that there are better chess games out there.

The definition of novelty is "something new and unusual." Once it stops being new, the enjoyment of it quickly fades - which is exactly what happens with Combat Chess. If you're a casual player who wants the option to see some action with your chess game, then it's not a bad purchase. Combat Chess is actually also not bad for teaching children chess. The animated pieces would probably hold their attention better than a normal chess set. The uncensored version is pretty violent, but there is an option of turning the gore off - making it child-safe. If you're a seasoned computer chess player, you probably already own a better game, and, unless you really want to see your opponent's king impaled when put in checkmate, this game will be of little interest to you.

The Good

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The Bad

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