This game is sick! I absolutely love it! Just got done with my second win, played it many hours straight now, lol. I know it shamelessly copies the aesthetic and flow of Balatro, but I don't think that's a bad thing. It's fun and addicting, especially if you have an itch to play chess, but not a full game. You end up playing some mini chess puzzles with the "Gambits", which are similar to the Jokers in Balatro. It makes for some interesting sessions.
Having said how much I've enjoyed it so far, I want to leave some of my thoughts on how things could changed to maximize the game's potential. You can tell a lot of care and passion went into the development of the game, so to the devs out there, if you see this, I hope it's helpful / constructive feedback.
Suggestions on the graphics and interface:
- I think some of the animations could be punched up a bit. For example in some places things look a bit
linear, whereas in Balatro the animations "pop" a bit more. Overall I think the aesthetic is 90% of what it
could be, maybe with another pass on the animation curves it could be spiced up a bit to drive home those
dopamine hits when you get a new piece, Gambit, or other stuff.
- I like the color scheme, but it feels like it could use just a little more contrast or saturation.
- The text can be quite small and difficult to read, even on large screens, especially for the Gambit tooltips.
- I think there's a small bug in the logic for selecting the default screen resolution. I'm using a 3440x1440 monitor, and
when I launched the game, it defaulted to 3440 wide, but something more than 1440 high, so some of the menus
were cut off. I changed it to 1440 high and it was fine.
- When multiple Gambit effects were triggered, it didn't seem to happen in sequence, but rather everything happened at
the same time. If multiple Gambits have an effect for a single action, it would be nice if the animations for those effects
played separately, and maybe were slowed down a bit so it was easier to see what was triggered. I think Balatro
does this pretty well when multiple Jokers trigger for a hand.
- It would be nice if the status for a piece was shown in a way that was a little more obvious, especially for the "Blessed"
status. A couple of times I thought my piece was protected, but the effect had worn off.
Suggestions for gameplay:
- For a lot of my runs, I didn't make much use of the Gambits, because I had to keep buying pieces to restore lost
material. With the more difficult rounds, you end up having to trade pieces to make progress, and it cuts down on the
material you're left with when the round ends. This means you have to spend your money on pieces just to keep
up, and it can start to feel like walking on a treadmill.
- Sometimes the Gambits can feel a bit useless, depending on what you get. I didn't feel like there was as much synergy
between the Gambits as there could be, at least for most of the time it felt like that. I will say that when things did
line up, it was pretty awesome, and I did have a couple of combos that felt pretty overpowered, which was nice. But
that only happened twice in probably 7 or 8 runs.
- It seems like sometimes the computer makes very obviously bad moves. To me, this cheapens the overall experience,
because it can start to feel like the game is overly random. At times I would just Wait on my turn, and rely on the
computer to make a terrible move, then make an easy capture. I get that the game should be fun and winnable, but
it might be better if there were some predictable rules that governed the play of the computer, for example, "always
capture the piece with the highest value first, if a capture is possible, otherwise defend the highest value piece if
one is threatened." This would make the gameplay more puzzle based. I did find that baiting the computer into
capturing certain pieces was a good strategy to open up the board for some levels, but it was a bit of a dice roll as to
what the computer would do. I guess that's not terrible, because it adds a bit of a gambling element in a way, but some
moves by the computer were just dumb. When this happens, it makes you think, "Maybe I should just move around
to avoid getting captured and then wait for the computer to make a dumb move." Maybe there could be a difficulty
setting that wasn't tied to the cost/availability of Gambits and other powerups, but instead controlled the strength of
the computer chess engine?
- I think it would be pretty neat if the pieces themselves could be upgraded somehow. I like how Balatro had different
different things that could be added to a card, like foil, holo, etc. I'm not exactly sure how that would work in this game,
but it might be a nice complement to the tile upgrade system.
Anyway, I've been enjoying the game, and I'd love to see it get a few more updates. Congrats to the devs on what they've managed to deliver so far. The bottom line is, if you like chess at all, and if you liked Balatro, it's definitely worth the 15 bucks.
