Combat Chess Reviews

A knock-off of Battle Chess for all intents and purposes. Cheaper, though. Worth a try.

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 resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. The implementation here is of such poor quality, the developer couldn't work out how to make the game display in fullscreen, it only runs in a selection of Windows UI windows. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 3 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. Combat Chess is relatively expensive for an abandonware nostalgia gouge, at $5 USD, and it's not worth it. The game is just too old, hasn't been modernised. And as the old saying goes, you can't go home again.

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.

I used to play this as a kid, it's excellent even today as a more budget friendly version of battle chess. Happy to see its made its way on to steam.

Actually so good. The animations are both cool and hilariously bad. Otherwise, it's just chess, so yeah, it's good.

Nice if you've played the original and have nostalgia, but isn't something you'd really play now. Super low res, awkward boxes that barely work, game crashed when I switched on my 2nd monitor and oh opponent takes 8-30 seconds for each of their turns! Cute idea and cool characters tho

This is something that goes way back in my childhood while i was learning chess, even though i wasn't great at it. But its overall fun. Though there are bugs that were never fixed when it comes to using certain features. Great for beginners all the way to Masters if you don't mind the aged resolution. Warning: Do not check preload animations, otherwise the game will crash on future startups and must delete the chess.cfg in your combat chess folder to get it working again.

I cant believe this is even on steam. This is an old game i played when i was like 9 years old. I am so happy i found it and for 5 bucks on steam. Its just a really fun animated chess :) Good for nostalgia.