iPhone Review: Chess Elite

Publisher/Developer: 99Games
Genre: Chess
Price: $3.99
Verdict: The best chess game you can get on the iPhone currently.
Pros: Provides a challenging chess experience if you so wish.
Cons:Couldn’t a lot of this have been implemented in an update?

In a not too distant past, I checked out ChessPro. It was a pretty solid Chess game for the iPhone, certainly one of the better ones I’ve played in recent times but it did lack a couple of quite vital features. Enter 99 Games’s way of rectifying this: Chess Elite.

Chess Elite, much like ChessPro, does pretty much everything you could want a Chess game to do. First of all it offers local play where it’s you versus the CPU. In this mode you can adjust the difficulty, you can make the CPU make a move fast but not necessarily well within four seconds, or you can bump it up to 120 seconds and make your opponent particularly good and frustrating. It was a pity for the impatient sorts like me that you couldn’t make the opponent fast at responding and strong at defeating you, but otherwise Chess Elite provided a challenging game when I wanted it and a simple game when I didn’t want a challenge. Unlike ChessPro, there is only the one mode: traditional chess which admittedly is all you need. However it also provides more ways of competing. Besides the local two player mode (a simple matter of passing the iPhone back and forth), you can play online with your contacts and you can play amongst the 99 Games community.

To do so takes a simple registration which was easily done on my iPhone, although I did need to log onto my email account to verify my address, so do make sure you use an email address that you can access from your iPhone. Once registered, you can send challenges to other players and take it in turns to make a move. This obviously can take a while if you live in different time zones but it works well. It reminded me of the ‘old’ days when you could play Chess games with your pen pal via the traditional mailing system.

As you would expect from a Chess game, Chess Elite is quite basic looking, perhaps functional would be a nicer way of putting it. It doesn’t need to be pretty so it simply doesn’t bother. The same can be said regarding its sound effects. What the game does offer is pure and simple strategy gaming. If you enjoy Chess you will enjoy this, especially if you throw yourself into playing via the Community option.

Much like Chess Pro, I am slightly unsure of the pricing at $3.99 but thanks to its community features, it feels like much better value for money. It really does offer longevity now rather than until you get bored of competing against the CPU. There really is nothing quite like playing against a real person. You may not be able to see their facial reactions when you pit them against a good move, but it is still always so much more fun to play against someone who can confound you with a move that a CPU simply wouldn’t think of. A cynic would question why 99 Games couldn’t have just updated Chess Pro with community features but despite this, if you’re a chess fan this really is the ultimate chess sim for the iPhone.