Battle chess
In case you don’t know what chess is I suggest you do a search on the internet because I won’t explain it here. Battlechess adds something with the intention of making the game more interesting for the casual player by having the pieces replaced with puppets that fight when you take another players piece. You won’t have to do anything besides thinking though because all the fighting is done automatically and the attacker always wins. If you don’t like the animations then you can turn them off but then you would have a chessgame just like any other.
You can select the level of the computer player from novice to level 9 but since my chessplaying abilities are almost nonexcistent I can’t really tell you if the gameplay is of a high standard. From what I hear though if you are an above average player it’s pretty easy to win. It’s too bad that with a more general audience in mind they did not include a tutorial to get you started, even a simple explanation of how the different pieces are moved would be good to get someone started. Beginners can still play the game because when you click on a piece the squares that it can move to will be highlighted when you move the mouse over them.
Apart from the animations there isn’t much else to set it apart from other chess games but they kept me entertained long enough for me to learn the basics when I first played it years ago. I can only recommend this game to novice player who already know at least how to move the pieces but for the advanced player the game will probably be to easy. There was also a sequel released in which you played Chinese chess, pretty rare stuff.
Overal rating: 7.5/10
This game was released for several different systems here are some notes:
| Apple | Released in 1989. Game has been tested but not completed with the ActiveGSapp R4. The amiga, atari st, dos and this version are practically identical. |
| Amiga | Released in 1988. Game has been tested but not completed with winUAE v0.9.91. |
| Atari ST | Released in 1989. Game has been tested but not completed with Steem v3.2. |
| C64 | Released in 1989. Game has been tested but not completed with CCS64 v2.0 win. Graphics look very grainy because of the dithering but gameplay is the same. |
| DOS | Released in 1988. Game has been tested but not completed on a DOS PC. |
| NES | Released in 1990 by Kemco. Game has been tested but not completed with FCE ultra v0.98.12. The view is not from above and behind like the others but only from above and when fighting the screen switches to a different screen. |
| Windows | Released in 1990. Game has been tested but not completed on a windows 2000 machine. This is actually the same as the DOS version but it includes a (really short) helpfile explaining some options. |
| Others | This version is not available. 3DO released in 1993. |
| Date added | Jan-11-2005 19:01 |
| Name | Battle chess |
| Developer | Interplay |
| Publisher | Interplay |
| First released | 1988 |
| Genre | Strategy |
