Online Chess Kingdoms

January 25,2007 - Online Chess Kingdoms sets itself up to give fans of Chess a new way to play the game they love on the PSP. Featuring a story mode that gives life to those little plastic chess pieces and puts the game on a scale that’s a little more epic than players are used to, the game tries its hardest to expand upon the simple game that everyone has known for ages. Does it really succeed in improving the game of Chess or should you just crack open the chessboard instead?

Online Chess Kingdom’s story mode starts with a god creating five worlds with which to play chess nicely. These kingdoms cannot play nicely, so the god sends them to their own realms to think about what they’ve done. Unfortunately, they find a way to reach each other and their wars continue in a strangely slow, turn-based manner. Each chapter follows a separate kingdom’s tale in this epic war. This ludicrous story is forgettable as just a set-up for battles that occur in the story mode itself.

There are two main gameplay modes offered in Online Chess Kingdoms, battle and classic mode. As you can guess, classic mode replicates the rules of chess that we all know and love. Battle mode turns chess into a real-time battle, which may sound interesting at first, but it ultimately turns into a mess where strategy and enjoyment is thrown aside for torment and chaos. The story mode adds a turn-based strategy shell around the game of chess, where the two warring kingdoms at that moment move armies across the map until they collide in a fairly organized game of chess. The computer AI can be a challenge, but it quite often tends to make boneheaded mistakes like sacrificing pieces for no reason at all.

While the title of the game suggests that online play is a big reason to get the game, the community, or lack thereof, completely hinders the game to the point that you may as well forget that an online option in the menus ever existed. Whatever interesting ways there may have been to play the game online doesn’t really matter if nobody is ever on. Ad-hoc multiplayer is an option, but frankly it’s probably cheaper and easier to just pull out a chessboard and play a friend instead. The game does a good job of fitting within the portable realm of gaming by offering the ability to save matches in progress when you don’t have the time to finish that game.

Once you reach a game of chess in whichever manner you choose, you’ll notice a few different boards that take place in several environments like a volcano, space, and a few other locations. The chess pieces themselves look alright and feature some unique designs, though some of the pieces bare little resemblance to the pieces they are representing. Once a chess piece is able to capture another piece, a short cinematic is played to show the victorious piece defeating his opponent. Frankly, the lack of the ability to skip these tedious scenes makes an already slow game even slower.

The game of chess itself doesn’t really need music as you would like to be able to concentrate on your strategy, but Online Chess Kingdoms isn’t so considerate. The epic soundtrack is just lousy, but can luckily be turned off in the options menu to save your ears this uninspiring music. The sounds the chess pieces themselves make are decent enough, but it might as well be turned off for the convenience of a peaceful game.

Sure, Online Chess Kingdoms lets you play chess, but why would you pay for a chess game that fails to considerably spice up the game with anything that’s worth the extra cost. The complete lack of an online community makes half of the reason to even pickup the game worthless, leaving single-player and ad-hoc multiplayer modes, which are futile when you have a computer or chessboard on hand. Do yourself a favor and save the cash for a shiny, new chessboard instead.

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