Progress Chess Reviews

I can give this a somewhat conflicted recommendation, with a few big caveats: First, polish and professionalism is in low supply here. Progress Chess uses a lot of gratis assets from around the internet, and they often seem a bit slapdash in their application (pieces that seem way too big or too small for the boards and (wonky) camera location, a lot of pitch-modified voices for supposed 8-year-olds who curse like sailors, and a lot of really poor English localization). Most of the chess sets are pretty ugly and/or illegible (and thus impractical for play) as rendered here. You have "over 20" sets but I never play with more than perhaps five or six of them. There also seem to be limitations (or bugs) regarding when you can change the set; I can change it on one game, and then play another game in the same tournament where the set is locked for no apparent reason. The audio quips made by the bots are cute at first, but they get repetitive and it's not always obvious how they correlate with the engine's "thought" process. Ditto for the environmental sound effects and music: they are fine in themselves, but played so regularly that the lack of variety becomes grating after a few hours. Most of this doesn't bother me, but it feels very amateurish and makes me question the professionalism involved in engineering and testing the underlying engine (which I'll discuss next). There are a number of unintuitive UI behaviors, and a few bugs too, but most are just annoying rather than game breaking. Second, (according to my discussions with the developer) this game uses a custom proprietary engine that I would classify as "flaky:" the way it plays, at low ratings at least, is inconsistent in an unpleasant way. It's actually very difficult to design powerful engines that can be "weakened" enough so that mere mortals can compete, while still preserving behavior that seems natural, interesting, and fun. This is why creating "human-like" bots has become a much more compelling frontier of research than making more engines that can beat the strongest players in the world with queen odds. My experience playing the Progress Chess bots at low levels is that they will play strong, logical moves that feel beyond the stated rating, and then make huge senseless blunders that no human would consider, in order to bring the overall strength of play down. This makes those games feel at turns aggressively calculated and then completely random, as if a dice throw is determining on which move(s) to make a highly improbable blunder in an otherwise flawless game. The developer was made aware of complaints about these bots, and claimed to "improve" them in the last update, but I haven't noticed a marked improvement; in fact many got worse, in my subjective appraisal. I'm also dubious about the methods used for assessing their ratings, which seem to have far too much variance. I suspect part of the reason the play is so "weird" is that this engine, according to the developer, was not designed for orthodox chess; it was designed to play the unique variant he created and included here (originally called Progressive Chess, which is where the game title comes from, the developer changed the variant name after I informed him Progressive chess was already a widely played variant with completely different rules.) These seem like insurmountable flaws, but the game has an eccentric appeal and a lot of unique features you won't find in other modern chess software. First among them being the unique variant mentioned, now called Transform-Chess. It involves temporal pawn promotion rules, secret information, and multiple choices per move. None of these mechanics are supported by existing variant engines like fairy-stockfish, so it's clear why the dev had to design his own. What's less clear is why he made the decision to spend so much energy building an orthodox chess game on top of it , instead of concentrating on the variant. That said, it's unique and can't be played against any other engine right now. Chess960 is also included, and you can play tournaments in both. There is a lot of emphasis on tournament features and bot personalities. It feels like the dev wants to recreate and expand on the features of Chessmaster, but The King was an engine that had many user-configurable personality parameters, and other UCI engines have been designed around such features subsequently. Does this engine have any meaningful play style parameters? It's hard to know since it's proprietary. There are no such knobs and dials exposed to the user, nor are the technical aspects explained in forums or documentation, so you have to take the dev's word for it, and use your own judgement. The dev also claims to have "modeled" various chess legends. What exactly this means is similarly obscure without technical descriptions, and I'm not a strong or historically informed enough player to make an educated assessment. To use a metaphor, there's a lot of "flavor" here but some of it leaves a bad taste. And the nutrition label is in Russian. TL;DR I would never recommend this as a primary, secondary, or tertiary chess application, but if you are a chess software collector, you'll find some unique fun and novelty here. There is a lot of love and a little too much ambition put into this package, for a reasonable price. The developer merges frequent updates and attempts to respond dutifully to feedback in a timely manner. With a lot of work and some luck, I've no doubt this could be a great, comprehensive, all-round chess game, but in its current state it is an amusing curiosity with some pretty rough edges. If the above sounds appealing to you, I'd say its well worth the $8

Impressed so far. You can tell the developers have a love for chess! Gonna keep my eye on this one...