CHESS CROWN is, well, chess. It's a 3D rendered chess game with two leaders on either side of the board that yell out "hey" or "ho" every time you make a move. Yeah, that's annoying. The game features network play but it's unclear if that was ever used, you're pretty much just going to play against the AI here, and it's not the strongest AI, either.
You can set 4K graphics (thanks to the Unity options screen) but that's all there is to it in terms of settings, that's a problem. The assets don't look so amazing either... in fact it makes me wonder if the game assets for this game were created by the developer, or if this is in no small part an asset flip. The developer doesn't seem to have credited anyone for the use of third party assets, so we are left to puzzle the tacit claim that this game was completely created in house, including the art assets.
There's no options to tweak the chess engine being used and it's a fairly weak engine. This won't offer a challenge to serious chess players and will come across as boring to people who aren't fans of chess (let's face it... chess video games really only exist to appeal to chess fans).
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
Bewilderingly, the game doesn't include proper audio controls, so you can't turn off the annoying background music, you'll need to alt+tab out and stop the music using the Windows sound mixer. This is obviously not okay and it's unclear why the developers chose not to include this basic feature.
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.
CHESS CROWN has the utterly unrealistic price of around $4 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. There's also dozens of free online chess leagues you can play in, so there's just no justification for charging money for this on Steam.
[b][quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/quote][/b]Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.
