Chess Survivors

I cannot understand how this broken horribly designed game has a very positive rating. It is absolutely terrible. The concept is great. That is why I bought it. I really wanted to like it. The execution is insulting. Here is why: They decided to design a turn based chess themed arena survivor game around timed turns. There is no reason for this. They say disabling it will disable other aspects of the game. The game should not have been designed with timed turns unless they were going to have an online versus mode. Which would have been cool except for the next issue. The controls are horrible. You are timed so you need to be able to position your move quickly and accurately. Not going to happen with a controller. I play with controller. I am not a mouse game enthusiast. If your movement area is just a 3x3 box, its not that bad but still bad. Still hard to move to corners. The cursor has no stickiness and with the timer going its high pressure and everything feels slippery AF. But if you have more moves, forget it. Its just a mess. The devs clearly knew their timer system was problematic, that is why they provided a disable option, but they discourage you from using it, so I am basing my review on their intended design of the game. Its chess themed, so why make it timed? Maybe a separate mode with a different mode of play, maybe a smaller arena with fewer enemies and/or a multiplayer mode, coop and vs? That would have been very cool. You could have two areas, a small confined board for quick matches, and a large overworld arena to spread out in and farm upgrades.. But I'm just lighting ass hair on fire, there is no fart there. I do not recommend it. If the devs fix the controls so you are not just slipping all ever the place trying to choose the square you want to move to, I might change the review, but I am pretty sure the game is long abandoned. Oh yeah, the UI sucks too.

I rarely write reviews, but this game is a confluence of my interests. Steam says I played 2 hours so far, and if you'd asked me how much I played last night I would have said 30 minutes. It's that kind of game. (And I know it's accurate because I was playing on the couch on my Steamdeck, and that thing shuts off automatically.) Is this the best survivors game on Steam? No, but it's actually better than probably 50% of the ones I've tried, and I've tried quite a few. And that doesn't even account for the chess angle, which is a palpable part of my interest. Recommended. Also, this didn't influence my review in any way, but the game's creator is on youtube, teaching folks to make games in Godot. Love it.

Simple but can be exactly the thing you might want, a nice relaxing time mixing upgrades and trying out different characters, figuring out their gimmicks. 5 bucks for a bet on a few pleasant hours,

nothing like chess [EDIT for the dev reply] Thanks, but I played the game. iirc from when I played it, the chess-feel quickly dissipates after the first few powerups, because they don't connect well with the original game idea. This plays more like a survivors with a chess skin.

This a very fun twist in the survival game, I quite enjoyed it. If you know chess but don't like to play it, this is a pretty great opt to use that knowledge, worth the price.

I was interested to see how Chess + Survivors would work and it definitely works. Not the most filled out or balanced but it's nice to click on specific tiles and see the results instead of just running around and hoping pixels don't overlap too much.

Chess Survivors is great, I highly recommend it! It shares some core concepts of Magic Survival/Vampire Survivors, where your character auto-fires its weapons, and you grow in power throughout a run as you defeat enemies, level up and beat stages. The enemies become more and more powerful and more frequent until you die or you beat Act 3 (or you can continue on in endless mode). As a chess fan I enjoyed how a lot of chess features were implemented, like how the enemy pieces move, the time controls and the gambit levels. The starting characters had a lot of variety in ways you could build out your character in a run and all the weapons were fun and unique.

core gameplay deserves awards but only entertaining for a few hours.

The concept is good. The execution is bad. - Most weapons only activate one every few turns, meaning that you may (and will) very often move without attacking. - The descriptions of the weapons doesn't show their turn cooldown. - The turns are timed. - You can turn the timer off but the game punishes you for that. - The weapons deal way too little damage. Refund.

Basic Not perfectly balanced but fun. Realistically not that deep but harder than you think because of RNG.