I love the game of chess more than nearly any video game ever released. Its strategic nature is timeless and fun, but while chess owns a renowned status as a thinking man’s game, video game iterations have often had a hard time being as epic as the real thing. As someone who grew up fiendishly playing chess, I readily admit that no digital version will ever be as good as sitting at a table, pieces placed and timer set. But some attempts are more successful than others.
When it comes to Pure Chess, you’ll find a game – whether on PlayStation 3 or PlayStation Vita -- that both hits the mark and misses it completely. Its single-player offerings challenge gamers with a variety of options that will please chess nuts, especially for its relatively low price (though you’ll need to purchase it twice if you want it for both PS3 and Vita). However, Pure Chess has completely unacceptable online functionality that’s flagrantly clumsy and lazily executed. Thus, in your pursuit of purchasing Pure Chess, you have to think about one thing and one thing only: do you want to play by yourself or online?
If you answered the former, you’re in luck, because Pure Chess totes a robust set of modes and options that prove their worth far beyond the $8 entry fee. For starters, you can play against the computer in standard exhibition matches, sorting through various difficulty settings to find the artificial intelligence that best suits your skill level. The AI makes smart moves for the most part, though some questionable tactics are deployed from time to time. Plenty of stat-keeping makes things interesting the more you play, though some of these stats seem glitched (especially when chronicling online play).
Tournament play also proves to be a lot of fun. Three tournaments of four games each are presented at increasing difficulty levels, and only by winning all four games in a row do you progress through the tournament successfully. When combined with fleshed-out tutorials to teach chess newbies the fundamentals and awesome “Mate in 1-5” puzzles that chess nerds will adore, there’s plenty to keep players busy. You can even play with a friend locally, customizing board setup and timing to your heart’s content.
Unfortunately, for all of the great single-player features Pure Chess offers, abysmal online play brings the whole package down. Pure Chess has no online gameplay per se, unless you count its “play by mail” correspondence-style chess. Pure Chess forces you to play against others like prisoners play with each other in supermax facilities by swapping annotated notes that are then clumsily loaded onto a board. Worse yet, the online functionality of Pure Chess utilizes the PlayStation 3’s wonky built-in messaging system in what can very well be the most unnecessarily cumbersome online setup ever seen in a PSN game.
Because of Pure Chess’s reliance on PSN messaging, you have to be friends with the person you want to play with to even get a match going. There’s no way to challenge someone randomly from a queue, which will be a gigantic problem for those who don’t flex their social muscles on PSN. Once you get past that ridiculous hurdle, you’re then subjected to a system where game data is sent via PSN message over and over again as you wait for the person on the other side to make his or her move. It’s a terrible system, and perhaps the worst possible solution to playing chess online. Correspondence chess continues to be a copout in lieu of seamless online play, and in the year 2012, it’s gotten beyond old.
Source : http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/06/01/pure-chess-review
No comments:
Post a Comment