Chess Brain: Dark Troops is a chess-based puzzle game published by QUByte Interactive.
The gameplay is fairly simple: You need to plan the route of the queen chess piece on a board in order to avoid other chess pieces and arrive at the orange board tile. The queen can move in all directions, while other chess pieces move according to standard chess rules: The tower can only move up, down, left right; the bishop can only move in diagonal lines and the knight can jump in L-shapes. You plan the route step by step by selecting (
) the tiles you want to queen to move next and when you are done you press the execute button (
) to see if it worked out. Each tile can only be traversed by the queen once. You can undo your last step with the B-button (
). The enemy chess pieces indicate in which direction they will move with a red arrow and a number at the bottom shows how many tiles they will move. Later levels will include red pieces which move in a specific circular route.
Visually the game is plain and simple with every chess piece being clearly identifiable. There is something satisfying about seeing the queen
dance between other chess pieces along the path you defined.
There are 30 levels in the game, it starts out fairly easily but gets more complex towards the end. The difficulty is fairly easy and the game can be completed in around 1 and half. There are also several video guides on Youtube which allow you to complete the game in 15 minutes. There are no missable achievements, all of them are progression based.
In conclusion I enjoyed the game for it's simple and fun puzzles, no level was too difficult and progression felt natural. It was worth my time considering the low price. There are similar chess-based puzzle games like
Knight's Retreat and
Chess Knights: Shinobi which have higher production value but are also a lot more complex, but for those games I decided to use a guide once I got stuck.
3.0