In this hectic world we live in, many times work and appointments must come before the fun and joys in our lives, including that of getting to play videogames whenever we want. Gone are the days when we could fire up a game of our choice and spend hours toiling away – now we seem to game in stolen moments here and there. With that in mind, perhaps it is no wonder that casual games have become such a popular gaming choice (especially with women who make up the vast majority of casual game players), as casual games allow us to either jump in and get those quick fixes of gaming bliss or either play them for as long as we want when we do have the time. In honor of the casual game, we'll be bringing you a new Casual Game of the Week every Monday to help you find that fix you might be needing in your life, and this week we have: War Chess

I remember playing an old battle chess game for the NES and having a great time, so when I heard about the premise and gameplay behind War Chess, I thought surely I’d run across the reincarnation of that once heralded game that my brother and me loved playing so much. After firing up War Chess and jumping into my first game, however, I knew all too quickly that things weren’t the same at all, and that this definitely wasn’t up to par like the game I liked way back then.

War Chess is basically the game of chess – nothing more and nothing less. The gameplay remains the same, where you use a variety of pieces that can move in specific directions or a specific number of squares. The ultimate goal of the game is to capture your opponent’s king, placing them into a state of check or checkmate so that you can win. Unlike some games that take the old formula and tweak it a bit for an updated release, here chess is still very much chess, and the only thing really different about this chess and others is the fact that it has “war” in the title and that pieces actually move and do a very quick fight or attack to represent the pieces eliminating each other.

If you aren’t familiar with the game of chess, the system does a nice job of showing you your possible moves, as you can left click on a piece to see where it would be able to move, and then clicking on the square where the piece will be able to go with a click of the right mouse button. The double click system didn’t work perfectly, as sometimes it took more than one click to register properly and have the pieces actually move where we wanted them to.

The game is focused strictly on the single player experience, letting you fight against one of several different AI levels, allowing new players to either fight the stupidest AI the game has, or cranking up the difficulty number for an even tougher challenge. Though there are several different modes, they all basically break down to the same chess game and rules you’d expect from the classic strategy game.

The thing that War Chess does do to try and set itself out among the rest is the fact that the standard pieces are now represented by 3D characters, such as Pegasus representing a knight or the queen looking like an old hag or the pawns of the black side being represented by a bunch of skeleton warriors. The characters are all the same, as one queen on one side is the same as the queen on the other, only their paint skin is different to represent whether they are on the white side (good) or black side (bad). The characters and creatures are very, very blocky and also ugly for that matter. The animations are quite limited as well, as a queen might zap someone with a staff from several squares away, and then she’ll slowly shuffle her way towards you until she reaches the spot of the piece she just removed. The levels are also equally poor, as they consist of places that are mostly barren or have little interaction or beauty to behold at all. Plain and simple, War Chess is an ugly game, and one that will make you reach for the online chess more so than this single-player game.

If you’re a huge chess fan you’ll like War Chess, but you’ll like the game for what it already is and not because the thing in front of you is new and improved. If anything this game actually made me not like chess as much as I once did, if only because the game is so ugly and the gameplay and menu systems so poor. Seriously, you’re better off just playing regular ol’ chess with the pieces you are already familiar with now, and if you really need to see your pieces attacking each, just imagine the pieces in real life are whatever you want them to be, and don’t bother wasting your money on a game like this. If I was reviewing the game of chess alone it would be a four or five easily, but when you place the word “war” before it, things suddenly become a lot worse, and then we want nothing more than to forget this game ever existed.

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