If you want to understand Massive Chalice, you need to understand XCOM.
I don’t mean that lightly. Double Fine’s Massive Chalice has been hugely influenced by Julian Gallop’s seminal 1994 strategy game. It exists as its own game in as much as it has a different name, and you’re controlling people with bows instead of people with guns. Beyond that, well. Here’s how I’d describe XCOM:
Set in a sci-fi world. It’s a turn-based tactics game with a strategic metagame. You build and research things in real-time, interrupted by enemy attacks which slowly encroach on your world regardless of how well you’re doing. Your soldiers have names, and their stats improve as they survive. If they don’t survive, you need to replace them with fresh, unlevelled meat.
And here’s how I’d describe Massive Chalice:
Set in a fantasy universe. It’s a turn-based tactics game with a strategic metagame. You build and research things in real-time, interrupted by enemy attacks which slowly encroach on your world regardless of how well you’re doing. Your soldiers have names, and their stats improve as they survive. If they don’t survive, you need to replace them with fresh, unlevelled meat.
There are differences, of course, and I’ll get to them later, but Massive Chalice’s adoration for XCOM needs to be kept in the centre of the frame the entire time you’re discussing the newer gamet. Like XCOM, Massive Chalice focuses on both up-close tactical gameplay and big-picture strategy. It handles the former exceptionally well, far better than it handles latter. For all the love it has t for XCOM’s tactics design, all the tinkering it does around the edges of XCOM’s formula, Massive Chalice also fails to capture that certain something that made XCOM truly great.
![Massive Chalice: The Kotaku Review](https://www.kotaku.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/10/1290185269506237359.gif?quality=75?quality=75)
You can choose the sigil for each of your five houses. You’ll spend a lot of time here.
Massive Chalice is a game of two halves. In one, you’re helping out the Massive Chalice, a huge, talking, immortal cup. This is a strategic game, where through building and planning you try and keep a monster invasion of your kingdom at bay long enough to unleash the Chalice’s power. The other half is tactical, and involves sending warriors into battle against the monsters.
The key to XCOM’s success (and its enduring place in the hearts of PC gamers), beyond its smart tactics and successful adoption of table-top wargaming rules, is a sense of attachment. Over the course of a campaign, you will grow to love the troops that you named after athletes and cartoon characters like they were your own children, and keeping those individual warriors safe soon takes on even greater importance than the bigger picture of saving the world.
Massive Chalice tries to do this, but in the end your love is ground to dust. Your attachment to XCOM’s soldiers comes not just from the fact they can die, but that they can also survive. You’ll have a handful of badass dudes and ladies who have looked death in the eye dozens of times, badassed themselves to maximum badassery, and lived to enjoy the party that comes after the bad guys are defeated.
There is no party in Massive Chalice. You’re in charge of a war effort over the span of 300 years, but the men and women fighting for you live normal human lifespans. The heroes you have at the start of the game will fight, marry, have babies, retire to teach and then die. Their babies will grow up to fight, marry, make babies of their own, retire and then die. And that’s provided you keep them alive in battles! If you can’t, then they just die a lot faster.
![Massive Chalice: The Kotaku Review](https://www.kotaku.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/10/1290185269569770159.gif?quality=75?quality=75)
The O’Hine family. Killers, every last one of them. Until they all died.
It’s got the right ingredients to get you attached — your heroes have names, and house sigils, and they make cute little babies who lie in cute little warrior cribs — but in the end, despite the game pleading for you to keep them alive through systems like ancestry (where traits are passed down) and item inheritance, I ended up coldly detaching from them. No matter how powerful they are, or how well you’ve looked after them, everyone in Massive Chalice is going to die. Every person is meat for the grinder, I learned, so don’t get attached, don’t try too hard to save them from enemy fire, just keep turning the handle and grinding.
And grind you will. Massive Chalice may be set in a fantasy world, but it’s one without gold, or ore, or lumber. The only resources you have at your disposal — time and people — are finite and precious. You expend time researching and building improvements to your realm, which gives you access to more troops and better gear, and you need to “spend” people to get those buildings working, striping you of your ranks of available soldiers.
Instead of becoming attached to these individually named and branded and married soldiers, I treated them like coins to be spent. Like coal for a furnace. Functional things, tools for my victory, devoid of any individuality.
Furthermore, there isn’t really much to do except watch a clock tick, which makes the big-picture strategic side of the game boring as hell. Luckily, then, that’s only half the game.
![Massive Chalice: The Kotaku Review](https://www.kotaku.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/10/1290185269681894831.png?quality=75?quality=75)
The tactical side of Massive Chalice — the part where you take those soldiers into battle on an isometric turn-based battlefield — is wonderful. It looks great, it plays great, it even feels great, with a sense of weight and purpose behind character movement and animation that I’ve never experienced in a game like this before.
At the start of the game, you’re given an army made up of only three classes of soldier. Which seems ridiculously limited, but by cross-breeding these classes together — and I mean literally marrying them off to make babies — you can make hybrid classes, which blend characteristics of the two. If the melee-focused Caberjack has a baby with the grenade-tossing Alchemist, for example, their kids will be melee specialists, only their weapons will have explosive properties.
Tactics, too, seem initially limited. There’s no overwatch, for example, so your first few battles involve little more than moving around and hitting things. But as the game progresses, stronger characters unlock a skill tree of special moves, each of which radically alters your approach to the game. Hunters (the game’s snipers) can cloak themselves to scout out enemy locations, while Alchemists soon earn the ability to throw grenades without using up any action points. Combine these abilities with the fact the cross-bred classes have their own skill trees to unlock and you’ll find that by the middle of a game you’ll have a ton of varied and entertaining tactical options at your disposal.
Enemy variety is also fantastic. Instead of just introducing varying types of enemies that exist only to harm you on the battlefield — though to be sure there are plenty of those — Massive Chalice has bad guys that can hurt you strategically. One ranged enemy can sap characters of XP, knocking out earned abilities, while another — the terrifying Wrinkler — will age a character by five years every time they’re touched (and you see it happen in real-time on the tactical map). Watching my best soldier go from strapping young man to grey-haired pensioner in just two turns is one of the cruellest, saddest things I’ve ever had to sit through in a strategy game. All those years they could have bred or instructed future generations of troops, lost in a heartbeat.
![Massive Chalice: The Kotaku Review](https://www.kotaku.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/10/1290185269809329071.gif?quality=75?quality=75)
I really like Massive Chalice. Yes, it has a fundamental problem in how it presents your relationship with its soldiers. And yes, it has other problems too; the big-picture strategic side of the game is dry and dull It will often run games down dead ends through a lack of feedback and cruel random events, wasting hours and hours of playtime as you’re forced to restart (something it actually seems quite proud of).
But for all the ways it doesn’t manage to channel the magic of XCOM, it gets a lot of things right. The art, the weight of the characters, the novelty of cross-breeding classes. The fact the game auto-generated me a Hero called “Panye West”. Even the voice acting is great, which is saying a lot since the only voice actors in the game are playing the role of a giant cup.
As a love letter to XCOM, Massive Chalice may miss some of what made its progenitor great; it’s all tributes to hair and eyes with nothing spoken of the heart. But it’s hard to get too down on Double Fine’s game for that. What’s there is still a good time.
![Massive Chalice: The Kotaku Review](https://www.kotaku.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/10/1290185269891584943.gif?quality=75?quality=75)
Comments
10 responses to “Massive Chalice: The Kotaku Review”
I got it with GWG played it once and deleted. Not my cuppa tea at all
Free at the moment so I’ll pick it up.
Where?
It sounds too much like Massive Phallus for me to take it seriously.
Whenever I hear about it I feel like the guard from the “Biggus Dickus” scene in Life of Brian.
“MS giving Gold users Massive Phallus for free”…. Hehehehe.
“Free at the moment so I’ll pick it up” – @outbreak …… hehheehehehe
The breeding system sounds a lot like Oreshika which I had fun playing though it’s very easy to end up stuck in cycles where no one gets any stronger. Combine that with X-COM type tactical gameplay and you have my attention, although a lot of reviews are saying that while it seems cool initially it doesn’t really motivate people to keep going.
I’m a sucker for all things turn based strategy.. Jumped on this many month ago and seem to have played 40 hours of it according to steam (almost all pre-release).
i loved the doublefine polish on the ascetics and the comedy, the voice actors do a fantastic job. As said above, the enemy types are well designed with quite devious special abilities.
The combat is lacking tho, for most of the game i found myself just running around in a tight group, systematically decimating all before me.. its only when the advanced monster types appear that things get difficult. No overwatch or opportunity fire type abilities reduce the tactical element of the combat alittle too much for my liking and the enemy AI is quite woeful – eg – shooting at an enemy one turn, have him spot you and charge towards you in his turn.. then only to have you duck out of line of sight and the enemy forgets hes even been in combat. *shrug*
Each monster is agro’d individually too, so groups of mobs often seem alittle dumb.
Its a fun game, its cheap.. easy to get value for money out of it tho.. Fills the gap between the 100s of hours i’ve devoted to Xcom Long War mod (unbelievably fantastic, highly recommended) Invisible inc. and ……. Xcom2 *drool*
I was on the fence about this, grabbed it free on xbone like all the other garbage titles (third month for pool nation? hello?), but you’ve sold me.
I have my own bloodline in the game, so I guess that negates the attachment issue for me because I’ve experienced none of that.
I love this game – went through on normal difficulty without too many dramas until near the end (some of the decisions you have to make can really suck…… Created a factional war which made all my archers reduce their accuracy… when I pretty much only had archers….). Started again on Brutal, and lasted 1 battle……
Game will go about 12 hours or so – if you liked xcom you will like it. If you like board games you will probably like it too, as it plays a lot like a board game.
My biggest issue is convincing myself to go again on the higher difficulty now I have seen the end, so if you have played xcom before, start on hard – I found the difficulty a bit low on normal, so give yourself a challenge if thats what you are into (and if you like xcom, that’s what you are into….)
Simon Templemaaaaaaaaan! 😀
I backed this on Kickstarter but still havent got around to playing it. Maybe this weekend.