Chess v1.6 | Published by
Robota Software | Via
Ste Packacing Source | Free
Overview
The name of the program is Chess. It's a chess game. Actually, it's a pretty good chess game.
Review
I'm one of the last people who should be reviewing a chess game, as I'm absolutely terrible at the game. I lasted exactly two matches in the chess club, when they booted me for calling a knight my "horsey" one too many times. I'll try not to let my lack of aptitude in the game color my review.
If you've not played a game with this app before, tapping on the icon will briefly flash a splash screen and then take you to a new game board.
The controls are simple and fairly intuitive: tap your piece to select, tap the space to move it to. At first, I was frustrated at an inability to drag my piece where I'd like it to go, but I realized that the size of the screen would have resulted in a lot of accidental moves. By the way, stick with the basic chessboard layout... replacing it with any of the other options will either make you want to dig out your old Commodore 64 or leave you in question as to what piece is where.
There's a couple things missing - for example,
you only have the option to play as white, and the webpage says that promoting pawns causing the game to hang at this time (fortunately, the computer is vastly smarter than I and never let it get that far).
Correction: You can play as black, by selecting the "Move" option under the Action menu.
But there are a large number of options for chess fans, including:
- Variable difficulty on a slider, for hundreds of settings between 1 and 8.
- Savng and loading prior games, to practice different strategies.
- A "hint" feature for your next move.
- Tabulation of all moves taken during the game.
- The ability to e-mail your game.
So, feature rich and at least good enough to kick my butt.
As you can see above, the programmers decided to show you all captured pieces in the title bar. Unfortunately, since they stack one atop the other, it quickly becomes an indistinguishable mass that partially obscures the top of the screen. It's small things like this that make the game feel less elegant, but can be easily ignored in favor of playability.
Summary
A few small design flaws, but geared towards the chess powerplayer.
Usability: 4 / 5
Value: 4 / 5
Entertainment: 4 / 5
Aesthetics: 3 / 5
Overall Rating: 3.75 / 5
