Combat Chess

Combat Chess is an ancient game from 1997. It's a whopping 26 years old at the time of this review. The game lacks support for any modern gaming display resolutions, hasn't been modernised or updated to run smoothly on modern gaming PCs. In fact it's so dated it seems to expect to run in a Windows 3.11/Windows 95 windowed session. Despite this lack of modernisation, it carries a pretty high price tag for such an ancient game. This seems to have been put on Steam as a nostalgia gouge. The game itself is just a lazy, unabashed ripoff of Battle Chess (copyright Electronic Arts, 1988). We can hope that EA will sue these guys into the ground, but given the game itself is based on Chess and thus at least in part, public domain, and EA have had 26 years to enforce their copyright, it's sadly unlikely. Anyway this is a garbage derivative ripoff of Battle Chess only inferior in all respects despite being almost 10 years newer. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolutio…

Good stuff: - Runs without the need to download any third-party mods or software. - Made before ESG ruined everything. - Chain-mail bikinis. Bad stuff: - Feels a little unresponsive. - Just sort of clunky & awkward in general I'd only recommend this if it's on sale for less than 99p, Simply due to how much of a clunky awkward mess it is.

Combat Chess takes the familiar structure of traditional chess and gives it a far more theatrical personality by transforming ordinary captures and movements into animated medieval fantasy encounters. Developed by Minds Eye Productions and published by Strategy First, it remains fundamentally a conventional chess game, but its presentation is designed for players who want something livelier than static black-and-white pieces. Instead of attempting to rewrite the rules, it concentrates on making each move entertaining to watch, creating an unusual mixture of serious board-game strategy and playful fantasy spectacle. The defining feature is its collection of animated 3D pieces. Pawns are represented as dragons, knights become actual armored warriors, and other familiar chess pieces receive similarly imaginative interpretations. Capturing an opponent does not simply remove a piece from the board. Instead, characters confront one another through dedicated combat animations, sometimes producing deliberately ridiculous results. A Black Knight can reduce opposing pawns to green jelly, while the Queen has her own wonderfully exaggerated methods of attacking. These moments give captures a …

I can't get this game to work. The cursor mirrors the left hand clock and then just drags the image of it behind itself with echoes. Then whenever the pieces animate they also generate an image of the clock on every frame of animation. What a bizarre bug.

Barely functions on modern PCs. I had to uninstall it and reinstall it just to adjust the resolution settings. The animations are super slow and make the chess matches take 3x the amount of time real chess takes. Super low resolution, annoying music, super difficult to adjust the options, and terrible pacing ruin the game. Do not touch.

Brings back memories