A King's Gambit Accepted!

‘Check and Slash’ forgoes strategy for action, trading in En Passant for Onslaught as you take control of the mighty black king and lay waste to the dastardly forces of White whose crimes include being a different color than us. The monsters.

A passable Souls-lite set exclusively in the top-down view of a chessboard, ‘Check and Slash’ is a bit caught between worlds, serving up an arena-roguelike feel (à la ‘Brotato’) while having you navigate from room to room Metroidvania-style (think a Legend of Zelda dungeon crawl) across a massive meta chessboard. Each room that makes up the world map chessboard is a chessboard itself, so get used to counting 8x8. The rooms interconnect sporadically, requiring you to defeat enemies to unlock some passages, while others are only unlocked via secret passages or upon the defeat of a tier boss (Boss Knight, White Queen, etc.)

Along the way you’ll rescue stranded black pieces (eight pawns, two knights, two bishops, two rooks and your queen), that increase your health or give you less useful bonuses. Defeating bosses gives you metroidvania-style game-changing abilities that make Check And Slash a breeze to beat once the bosses start falling. Highlights of our playthrough include encountering the third tier boss ‘The Bishop Pair’, a suitably funny nod to the trope that all Souls games have a duo bossfight halfway through the game.

Several of the game mechanics could be completely trivialized by constantly moving and swinging your big beefy sword on cooldown. I get the sense the designer wanted you to have to be careful and strategic with your movement, as you originally needed to move in between each attack, and it punished you with a free counter-attack if you attacked a ‘Protected’ enemy. (The game considered it a reward to give you more attacks available before movement is forced, and you get constant boosts to your mobility options to threaten more pieces at once, removing their Protected buff.) In reality, I never stopped moving so the attack limit-per-move was meaningless, and simply spamming attacks against everything (including Protected enemies) and just dodging the free counterattacks was much more efficient than trying to time your attacks, rendering these rewards mostly meaningless.

On death, there is a Souls recovery mechanic, where half of your bonus damage (the main source of progression in this game) was given to a mook piece outside the boss room; kill it and you get all your stuff back - not a bad way to handle death for a game like this. The upgrades presented upon clearing each room were imbalanced, which can be fine. I identified early that Bonus Damage was the key to progression and picked the perks that gave you permanent bonus damage when killing specific pieces, ramping me up very quickly. Exploration perks such as revealing the location of stranded black pieces or nerfs to enemy pieces paled in comparison to the damage perks. Fortunately, you get five(!) rerolls per room, so you’ll never wind up with a suboptimal perk, which was a very player-friendly design choice I may not have made.

The boss fights themselves were thematically satisfying; enemies tended to attack in the ways their chess pieces move in the real game, with small riffs such as the Queen’s omni-movement sending out starbursts of projectiles that needed to be diligently dodged. The bonus damage capped at 999, allowing me to explore the other perks about 70% of the way through the game; nothing really stood out.