First Impressions: Unlock the King (NS)

I saw a trailer for Unlock the King back in late-February and the premise looked like a lot of fun.  Essentially you have a selection of squares from a chessboard, a pre-picked selection of chess pieces, and your goal is to get the king to a goal, using the standard movement of the specific chess pieces.  I have played a similarly styled mini-games as part of Chessmaster: The Art of Learning on the Nintendo DS, so having a chess-based puzzle game on the Switch would be a nice addition and something I could play in short bursts between games.

Wait?  How What Do?

Now, before you go galumphing off to the eShop and plunk down $0.99 (although it is currently on sale for $0.49), these are the main things you need to know.  First off, there is no official hand-holding in a here are how chess pieces move type of tutorial.  You start Level 1 with your board of four squares with one square being the goal, and two chess pieces: one rook and a king.  Let me walk that back a little bit.  The first couple of levels do function at tutorial levels, teaching the player how to move a specific peice, but once new pieces are introduced you are expected to quickly pick up and remember how they all move as more pieces are introduced in subsequent puzzles.  And these are somewhat stylized chess pieces too, like they were designed in the Tron universe; not a bad thing, just an observation.  If you have never played chess or do not know how a knight moves might be confused at first, especially if you are playing either on PC where you have to select the piece and select the correct square you want to move it to, or if you are using a touchscreen which is essentially the same thing.  When using a controller, you would just select the piece then cycle through the available spaces you can move your piece to.

All of that being said, I might be surprised if more than a handful of people quit the game out of frustration at any lack of instruction.  I do not want to be gatekeeping, but you kind of have to know what you are getting yourself into when you buy a game centered around chess piece movements.  You may not be expected to have a rudimentary knowledge of chess pieces and how they move, but I found it to be exceedingly helpful to feel like I at least knew what I was doing.

The only other fault that I have with Unlock the King is that it almost makes the puzzles too easy, not in difficulty, but in execution.  When I started, I expected there to be a move counter, that you had to complete each stage in a specific number of moves, not including the moves that the King needs to make to get to the end.  But no, you have an unlimited amount of moves, which could mean that Minimol Games' own goal was to make the game as accessible to as many people as possible (but then why not include a tutorial?), or that determining a move limit would have been too complicated without subcontracting out a chess master for quality assurance.  The only other mechanical fault of sorts is that once you moved the piece that allows the King to reach the Goal, the computer takes control of the King to speed its way through to the end.  It feels a little anticlimactic, especially in later stages where it takes minutes to move the pieces to the right spaces, often having to double back to get knights and bishops out of the way.  On more than one occasion I found myself finishing a puzzle quicker than expected, with the King suddenly moving before I thought I had finished.

Now that that is out of the way, Unlock the King is a lot of fun.  The game never makes any claims to give the player puzzles that will help their chess game, or teach them complicated maneuvers to outwit future opponents.  It is a puzzle game that might give you twenty squares in a pattern with eight knights, two bishops, and six pawns in the way of the King's goal.  It is your job to figure out how to move the pieces in a way that will allow the King to move through the spaces as a King is allowed to move (forward, backward, and diagonally, but only one square at-a-time).

This is pretty much what you do on each level, except you do have the added ability to rotate the board as well as zoom in and out, which I really only do in the beginning to get what I feel to be the best angle to solve the puzzle; no dynamic camera movements needed, this is chess after all.  Some of the later levels have made me a little anxious though, similar to how I feel about sliding box puzzles, in that I might get frustrated and just haphazardly start moving pieces and hope that a solution magically appears, which goes back to wishing that there was some type of move counter.  That way at least I would not feel that a puzzle could take upwards of 100+ moves to complete.

You know, I feel like that is really all I came to talk about.  I have finished through Level 26 of the available 100 puzzles, some being just a little more difficult than the one that came before, but the increase in difficulty seems fair.  Sure, there are some solutions that I am able to see faster than others, but that is just the way some puzzles are.  In the end, if you have never played chess before, there should be better games out there to teach you the fundamentals, but if you feel comfortable around chess pieces and enjoy puzzles, then you would be hard-pressed to find a more economically priced game for the amount of puzzles contained herein.



~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian
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