Disclaimer: I received a copy of Chess Knights: Viking Lands by Minimol Games from publisher QUByte Interactive for 420MacMan's #IndieSelect. The game was given and received without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and that experience be shared through social media channels. All pictures and words unless otherwise noted are my own from my own experience playing the game.
I have played a number of Minimol Games' chess puzzle games (Unlock the King, Knight Swap) so I kind of felt I knew what I was getting myself into, or at least the quality of the game that I was about to start; although aside from the screenshots in 420MacMan's original Twitter post, I did not know anything about how the game played. I have also played a decent amount of chess, but I am not a particularly great player as I can have trouble imagining the board even just a few moves ahead of where the pieces are.
When I turned on Chess Knights: Viking Lands (or just Chess Knights for simplicity sake), I was unsure of what exactly the game was going to entail. I clicked on the Tutorial tab to check see what the game needed to tell me to understand what I needed to do, and because in Unlock the King I felt that that a basic understanding of Chess needed to be known, but here there is a rundown of how the Chess pieces used here can move. But the rest of the tutorial consists of the barest of bones in terms of controls. You use the L/R buttons to select the specific Knight you want to play, you can rotate the camera with he Right Joystick, and you can zoom in/out with the ZL and ZR buttons. That is it. No goal, no objective. that is it; aside from telling you how the Knight, Queen, Rook, and Bishop move, and that the Knight can jump over obstacles (remember that one for later because I apparently did not). I should also point out (because who would I be if I did not), was that Knight was misspelled as "Knigh" under the "Knigh Move" tab in the tutorial.
When I started the main campaign, I had a mix of emotions ranging from this being a fun concept all the way to what the hell is going on and holy crap these controls are horrible.
Let us start with the controls because those are integral to actually being able to play the game. Whenn using a controller, you use the Left Joystick to rotate a red arrow around the current Knight you are using to then select an available space to move your piece to. This move mechanic is strange to me for the sake of simplicity as I do not see the reason to have a floating arrow until you point towards a square you can successfully move to, which then highlights that square red you can move to. Why not just have the game automatically highlight the closest square you can move you when you point the cursor and still utilize the rotating joystick mechanic when selecting the square, but not have the floating arrow? Does that make sense? Essentially having the floating arrow implies that there is guesswork with the player being like, "Can I move here, here, here, here?" If the controller controls were giving me so much trouble, why not just use the touch screen functionality I hear you vehemently ask? Well, I did try using the touch screen a couple of times, but I personally found that I was never able to zoom in close enough to feel that my sausage fingers were not covering no less than four squares with every press, which was not too much of a problem when selecting where I wanted the Knight to move, but selecting the piece whenever they were clustered together became a little bit of a hassle.
And then there was the camera controls, which actually function well enough as you can rotate the camera on both the X and Y axis and you can zoom in and out a bit with the ZR/ZL buttons. But again, I never felt like I could zoom in close enough to have the touch screen be a viable controller with the size of the screen. Most of the time though, I would keep the camera directly above the playable area, mainly because that is how I can best look at the full chess board, but also because I do not need to have a dynamic view of the board. And this approach works out fine. Until you rescue one of the pieces and now all of a sudden your controls become flipped 180 degrees.
Even when I know that this mechanic is there and I can either rotate the camera 180 degrees or just invert my brain when pointing with the red arrow, there is still a second or two where I feel completely disoriented. To say nothing of the levels where you have Knights starting on opposite sides of the board which means the control scheme becomes flipped when you select those Knights to move. Through at least the first 30 stages (through the first three of four worlds) I have not run across a stage where Knights start out on more than two sides but that would not surprise me at all if that comes across in the final stages.
My other gripe with the game is that the difficulty curve becomes rather steep, especially if you happen to forget that the Knight can jump over obstacles like boxes, barrels, wooden planks that would otherwise block the path of the enemy pieces. In some ways being able to move around obstacles seems to favor the Knight, but then the clogged up spaces means that there are now spaces that you cannot access making your movement around the board all the more constrained often forcing you to actively avoid the enemy pieces. Thankfully in most of the of the stages beyond the first couple, you are given at least two Knights to use to rescue your other pieces, but they can also be used to sacrifice themselves to take enemy pieces. Unlike regular Chess, in Chess Knights, you cannot actively attack enemy pieces, but instead you can move your Knight into a position where they will be captured, but the enemy pieces is also captured too. This does however mean that rescuing more than one piece could take longer as you have to move the one Knight all over the board, but as there is no requirement ot have X number of Knights at the end of each stage to continue, I have found no reason to not sacrifice pieces to help clear up the board of enemy pieces.
Or is there?
When you start the game, there is a menu option called The Lost Ones that is locked. After I finished the first world of Njord's Bay, the game gives you a prompt, that not everyone was saved and if you want to go back and save them. Presumably, this means to replay the levels to rescue all of your pieces without losing any of the Knights. I say presumably because there is no deeper explanation as to who specifically these Lost Ones are. I played through the first two levels in Njord's Bay, but the layout of the stages as well as the number of Knights you have is different. It would seem that The Lost Ones are just more stages that are more difficult than the regular stages? At present I have completed the first three Lost One stages and they are noticeably more difficult, or at least on par with those in the third world, Yddrasil Way.
I know I have complained quite a bit about the controls and camera controls, the difficulty jumps and the in-game descriptions of your objectives (or lack thereof), but when I am in the zone, I do have a lot of fun. I enjoy Chess puzzles, I really enjoy the aesthetic and the game runs smoothly for the most part. I can appreciate what Minimol Games is trying to do here, but there just is not enough polish in the form of proof reading (and in one case button prompts have been switched), and revamping the camera and control system to help make it feel more intuitive and less like the game is trying to trip you up.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
You Can Sing About Change
You Can Sing About Change
P.S. If you would like to see me fail on 3-30 and how the enemy pieces move in their routes to make it difficult to get back to the starting/safe zones, have I got a short 30 second video for you.
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