I'm a little disappointed. I went into this with a bit of dread. I half-expected something that would task me, repeatedly beat me down until I lost all hope and just began thoughtlessly clicking away at buttons to make it go away. Then maybe, slowly, I would get a little better and learn a little something about the nature of chess. I thought it would be something that would test me. And I feared that I wouldn't pass.
Unfortunately, Chess 2 is not that good a game. The rules are interesting, and apparently people can and do play it face-to-face. It's easy to see how it might have a niche as a fast and casual game whose complexity and asymmetry render the skill differences in regular chess less significant. It would certainly make for a fun warm-up or cool-down game for a club or casual tournament.
However, its video game implementation leaves a lot to be desired. It only has one single-player mode, and, unlike other chess video games I've played in the past, has only one available chess set. There's only one difficulty level and you can't even adjust the sound settings. It's just overall shoddily put together and probably incomplete (there's a greyed-out entry on the menu called "Challenges" that doesn't do anything).
And yet, that all wouldn't be so bad, if it weren't for the terrible AI. How bad is it? Let's just put it this way - it's so bad that even I can win games more often than not. And that's not just me being excessively self-deprecating. The game just straight up makes bad moves. It will let me threaten pieces without guarding them or let me capture guarded pieces without retaliating. There have been time where I've wreaked havoc behind the enemy's pawns because the AI couldn't recognize a pattern.
Which makes it all the more embarrassing that I've lost at least three times. I'm not used to Chess 2's new victory condition. I'll be dominating in terms of material and (for a traditional game) position, and then suddenly the enemy king will move towards the halfway line and I'll realize that I have no pieces in place to block its movement. Because why would you do something so colossally foolish as to move your king boldly out into the open with no protection, especially while the opponent is demolishing all your pieces. But, of course, if you win the game by doing it . . .
Anyway, I'll leave a more in-depth analysis for a future blog post. For now, I'm optimistic that I won't spiral into an inescapable swamp of self-loathing, but I'm also pretty sure that I won't improve my regular chess game. I'll have to wait and see if the tradeoff is worth it.
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