Nobody asked for this. I don’t imagine many people saw Apex Legends and thought ‘we could still do with a few more battle royale games.’ Then there’s last year’s glut of autobattlers, where some of the world’s biggest developers jumped onto what was a niche mod-within-a-mod as fast as possible. Did anyone look at those two genres and think, yep, wish someone would combine them? Yet here we are.
Enter Ubisoft from stage left, with Might & Magic: Chess Royale. Ubisoft, the company that owns the rights to put the name ‘Tom Clancy’ in front of basically anything it wants, including the Splinter Cell, Rainbow Six, and Ghost Recon franchises, but has not yet released a battle royale. Ubisoft, which could have spun a few extra quid out of any of these franchises by sticking a last-man-standing mode into any of them, but has opted for a very different direction.
As the name suggests, Chess Royale borrows the last-man-standing trope, but does so by way of the autobattler, using the readily-available Might & Magic franchise to position Ubisoft’s effort closer to high-profile, high-fantasy frontrunners like Teamfight Tactics and Dota Underlords. It sounds like little more than a hastily cobbled-together mishmash of genres that have no business existing anywhere near one another. But what really blows me away is that it’s actually quite good.
If you’re familiar with autobattlers, you won’t find many surprises here. Players purchase units, using them to build synergies with other characters and buying copies to upgrade their current roster before letting their units loose to fight against another players’ team. If you’ve dabbled with Underlords or TFT, you’ll be familiar with the concept, although this latest effort scales down some of those games’ complexity in an attempt to speed up matches and bring the genre to mobile. Much of Chess Royale is smaller than its counterparts – a reduced board size, fewer units, and class traits that are easier to attain all help shrink much of the overall scope.
When it comes to player counts, however, things get significantly bigger. Parachutes and looting are out, but Chess Royale lives up to the second half of its name with a starting line-up of 100 players. At the start of a match, each player has three lives, and is matched with another player at random on a round-by-round basis. Round one is a freebie, but after that, you lose one life for each matchup you lose. Lose all three lives, and you’re out, your avatar disappearing from the starting grid. It doesn’t exactly live up to the tense exchanges offered by Fortnite or PUBG, but watching defeated players fall away and seeing the field open up causes an undeniable surge of excitement.
In other autobattlers, you’re tasked with gradually piecing together a perfectly-crafted team to ensure victory. It can take ages to find the pieces you need to activate the synergies you need, and even longer to ensure you get the items that will ensure you get the most out of your fighters. In those games, Chess Royale’s three-strikes system would feel almost unbelievably cruel, but in Ubisoft’s slimmed-down setting, it not only helps keep the action ticking over at a much faster rate, but also ensures that there’s still a sense of tension, even when one player looks to be running away with the game. A couple of slip-ups from your opponent or a timely new addition to your team can entirely change your fortunes, preventing longer games from feeling like you’re just gradually bleeding out.
With this relative simplicity playing into its hand, Chess Royale’s greatest weakness is its setting. The autobattler genre is dominated by fantasy franchises with, to my mind, more fleshed-out and interesting universes than (this particular example of) Might & Magic. While Teamfight Tactics lets me piece together teams made up of my favourite League of Legends characters, this has me picking between generic fantasy figures like Harpy, Druid, and Orc. Efforts have been made to make the game easier to read under time pressure, but the combination of a mobile-friendly interface and some truly non-descript units makes for a game that lacks the personality of its biggest competitors.
I started out in Chess Royale with scepticism but, after a couple of faltering steps, quickly found a genuinely exciting take on a genre that I’ve so far struggled to enjoy as much as I would have liked to. The reduced scope is matched by a faster, tenser experience that seems like the best way for the autobattler to continue to expand, showing a possible future for the genre that its more strategic counterparts might struggle to match.
This post originally appeared on Kotaku UK, bringing you original reporting, game culture and humour from the British isles.
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