Chess Knights: Viking Lands

Genre: Puzzle / Board Game

Players: 1

.

Review:

Chess Knights: Viking Lands, released on PC in 2020 and ported to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in 2021, is a Puzzle game that takes the basic rules of the classic Board Game, Chess, and uses them to challenge players to move knight pieces from a starting point to an exit.

The presentation in this game is good, making use of snowy landscapes and wooden structures befitting the viking theme, with some decent but unimpressive snow and lighting effects This game looks good overall, although it did seem like the framerates dropped a bit on occasion. Also, the stylized look of the game makes it harder to tell at a glance what all of the pieces are supposed to be. The game’s visuals are backed by a subdued instrumental soundtrack that doesn’t necessarily evoke the “viking” theme, but still adds an element of atmosphere to the game.

Thankfully, this game doesn’t seem to be outright broken in the same way as Chess Knights: Shinobi, but it still has issues. Gone are the inconsistent game design issues, the absurdly long startup times, and the overall glitchyness of Chess Knight: Shinobi, but it’s still using well-worn gameplay, and there are other issues still present on top of that.

Once again, you can rotate and zoom the camera, but it is always fixed on a point at the center of the board/puzzle, meaning that if you want to get a closer look at one side of the board, you’re out of luck. Also, the way your cursor moves does not adjust relative to where your camera is, which means sometimes you may have to press down and left on the analog stick to move up and to the right, as an example.

Finally, I should mention that this game does support the use of the touchscreen, which mostly works okay but sometimes doesn’t seem to detect input.

Chess Knights: Viking Lands is a much better game overall than Chess Knight: Shinobi thanks to numerous problems in Shinobi that are not present here. However, this game still has multiple issues bogging it down, and in the end even without these issues it would still be an unexciting take on an old formula for a Puzzle game. If you’re a fan of Chess and Puzzle games, you may enjoy this, but don’t expect anything particularly exceptional.

tl;dr – Chess Knights: Viking Lands is a Puzzle game using Chess rules where players must move a knight piece to an exit. This game doesn’t have many of the issues that plagues Chess Knights: Shinobi, but it still has problems with its camera and a few other small issues, and that is on top of a pretty unexciting game with a worn-out gameplay formula. If you’re a fan of Chess and Puzzle games, this may be of interest to you, but otherwise it’s not worth your time.

Grade: C-

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