iPhone Review: ChessPro

Developer/Publisher: 99Games
Price: $3.99 (Lite Version Available for $0,99)
Verdict: Plays a great game of chess, but maybe stick with the Lite version.
Pros: Solid Chess conversion, simple to pick up and play
Cons: Little bit pricey for what it offers

Chess is practically as old as time, with the current form of the game that we recognise stemming from the 15th Century. It’s the perfect strategy game in many people’s eyes, myself included. So it makes sense that an incarnation of Chess should appear on the iPhone sooner or later.

ChessPro does pretty much everything you would want from a Chess game, give or take a few minor adjustments. It offers a 2 player hotseat mode where you just pass the iPhone back and forth to each other, as well as offering a player versus CPU mode which I suspect will be the most played option. As well as the classic game, it also offers two variants: Suicide and Losers. Suicide and Losers are quite similar, in that they both require the player to clear the board of pieces to win. The difference between the two is that Suicide treats the King piece the same as any other piece in terms of importance. Losers is the harder of the two as you can still lose if the opposing player gets Checkmate, but you also still have to clear the board of pieces. Priority is given to checking the player so it does involve quite a lot of forethought to win. In the Suicide variant, if you are in a position to take a piece, you must take it, which is sometimes advantageous, but not always.

Of course none of these variants would matter if the game AI was poor, but luckily I found it to be quite challenging. You can adjust the difficulty level which provides a useful learning curve. There is also the option of asking for hints while in game, allowing the CPU player to take your move for you. I did find this useful at times but I’d recommend not relying on it, certainly not if you want to improve your chess skills as it takes away all the fun of the game. Also I did find sometimes that the Hint function got stuck in a loop, repeating the same moves, over and over again. The only feature I would have really liked to have seen in ChessPro was a Force Move function. I might just be impatient, but when I’m playing against a CPU, I do like to be able to hurry it along. This is a minor problem however, as overall ChessPro does everything you could require from a Chess game. Sure, it looks very basic and functional (although the basic 3D graphics do try their best), and the sound effects are pointless, but you don’t play Chess for these features. You play it for the strategy, and it does that perfectly and I have no complaints there.

My only real concern with ChessPro is with the price. At $3.99 it’s not quite in the impulse buy range for many. As well as that, there is a ChessLite version available which is only $0.99. It lacks a few features like the additional game modes, and doesn’t have the shiny 3D graphics but other than that, if you want a decent Chess game, you might as well stick with ChessLite. So I’d recommend that instead.

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