People’s Chess is a humoristic AR chess game that instead of regular chess pieces you play it using army pieces where the king is one of the represented country’s leader. Yes, Trump is there is you’ve wondered.
The developer has taken a humorous approach for the game’s design. When you move the pieces they make voices, but those voices are of poor quality in my opinion. You move the pieces by tapping and holding and moving the unit to another place on the board based on the chess rules of course.
I found the unit-movement control to be very inconvenient in AR. Moving the pieces in 3D, at least in this game, felt really awkward. I found myself trying to move pieces several times without success and it was very annoying to say at least. The reason for that is that you can’t see exactly where the unit hovers on the board and I find myself trying to move a unit several times and it was very annoying. Furthermore, there are some air units for the Knight that float in mid-air and because of that, it’s hard to see on which square it stands on. Again, a usability issue due to the placement of the floating 3D unit.
You have two games modes: Solo and Multi (2-player local multiplayer). You can play the game locally against another player but there is no online matchmaking in this game. There is a nice animation that flips the board each turn so each player can play his turn comfortably in the right perspective of his side of the board.
There is no difficulty setting, so this game isn’t for serious chess players, it’s more for casual players who just want to play a quick chess game session with a unique chess game design for a change.
Although I liked this original military unit design, I was disappointed to see that there are no 1-vs-1 combat animations. The unit just runs over another unit and that unit is removed from the board. I think if the developer has chosen to go with a military theme, at least add some nice combat animations and visual effects, but there is nothing like that in this game. It’s like you lose the whole purpose of using this unique military-theme for entertainment purposes. It just doesn’t feel that entertaining without ant combat animations and visual effects. The idea is nice but the execution is very much lacking.
I’ve read in the official game’s description that the developer plans to add new armies and leaders regularly, so we are going to see more armies not just that of the US and North Korea. By the way, I really liked the tagline of the game: “Make AR Great Again!”, 🙂 .
People’s Chess also has some severe bugs. Sometimes I just couldn’t move certain pieces even though I wasn’t in ‘Check’ position. One time my ‘Trump’ (King) unit was removed from the board after an enemy tank (Rook) moves on its tile, but the game didn’t end. After some moves, I just couldn’t move any pieces that were still on the board. These bugs just break the game and until those are fixed, I certainly don’t recommend buying the game.
Another thing that I didn’t like is that it doesn’t matter which side wins, its always shows the word Victory with the leader of the side that won. I should see my leader with a sad face and a text “Fail” or something, not “Victory”. It was very confusing at first because I thought that I won, and I actually didn’t understand why.
The AR experience was good. I was able to quickly spawn the board on the table and play the game.
Conclusion
I like the military design notion for a chess game but People’s Chess has many UI issues and bugs that just break the game. The lack of combat animations also makes the theme less exciting than it could have been. Until those changes are made, I can’t recommend this game, especially as a paid app.
If I want to play chess, I wouldn’t touch this game, because there are plenty of great chess apps out there that are just much better than this one. The added touch of humor isn’t enough to make the game stand out from the rest and due to design issues, I didn’t even enjoy playing it in augmented reality.