Chess 2: The Sequel Review

‘And so begins the revolution’. These words are the first thing I see as I open my brand new OUYA and prepare to set it up. After I hook it all up and make an account, I open my games tab, and inside sits a game which is going to decide for me if this truly is a revolution or not.

The game in question is a sequel… to… Chess… What? Yes, the imaginatively named Chess 2: The Sequel is the ‘sequel’ to the popular board game Chess. I could write a massive review about what Chess is but by the time I’ve finished my great grandchildren will probably have just pre-ordered Half-Life 3 so I won’t bore you and be sure to keep things to what’s different here.

A big new addition is the ability to change your army. This switches around some of the abilities of certain pieces. For instance, there is the ‘Reaper’ army, in which the Queen and the Castle (or Rook, whatever you want to call it) are switched up. The Queen is a Reaper now. The Reaper can move anywhere at all on the battlefield except the opponents back line of defence and can take any piece except a king. The castle is replaced by a Ghost. Which can move in any vacant space, but they can’t capture pieces or be captured, meaning they are mainly used for blocking pieces in or herding them around once you’re trying to take their king out.

When a piece is attacked, the defending player has the chance to have the two pieces ‘duel’. If they choose to do so, the two players have the choice of betting balls. Each player starts with three balls, and can gain balls by taking out enemy Pawns. If the defending player bets a higher amount of balls, the attacking piece is also killed. Whatever the outcome, the defending players piece is killed, no matter what. The defending player can also choose to accept a duel, only to bluff and not bet any balls. This can be used to waste your opponents balls, and can be a good strategic move if done right.

One of the main different features in Chess 2 is the fact that there is a new way to win a match. This is by getting your King past the halfway line of the board. You can’t move your king over the line if he is going to be checkmated, but unfortunately, that doesn’t really deter it. I won roughly five games in a row by moving my king in a straight line because my opponent couldn’t do anything to stop it, and that brings me onto my second point.

The AI Is terrible. There is no nice way way to put it. It’s crap. I’m not just speaking about how it takes ages to take a turn, or that they make a bad move every now and then, I mean they actually lack common sense. Such as when I was playing as the Reaper army, one game I was able to use the Reaper to wipe out the entirety of the enemy pawns because he did absolutely nothing as I swept through his defence. In fact, he started moving his other pieces forward, allowing me to take those as well. I actually began making the Reaper vulnerable to capture and instead he’d go off and move a pawn that is on the other side of the board. Only six pieces of his remained before it registered to him that there was a Reaper killing all of his pieces and he actually attacked it.

The terrible AI, coupled with the uninteresting and repetitive matches, makes for a pretty embarrassing start for the OUYA. Seriously, come on, the best medal they deserve is that they actually managed to f**k up Chess. That’s pretty damn impressive, I mean, it’s Chess for crying out loud. I can only hope that the OUYA has some great games hidden somewhere up its sleeves.