Chess-Rogue-Like
Snape Like Or Rogue Lite, let’s not start the debate. There is always that Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate has to snap in the blood. You could even say that all of his hemoglobin smells like a snap old-fashioned, rough, bitter and terribly addictive. His concept fits on a corner of a white tablecloth: in the Kingdom of Chess, the Black King wallowed in debauchery. His troops therefore finally set sail and went to join the flock of the White King. Motivated by a desire for revenge and gratuitous violence, the Black King gets up one morning, brandishing his trusty shotgun, and decides to go show the faithful of the White King who is the Boss.
Controller in hand, it is therefore in the ebony bark of the Black King that we set off to attack the enemy forces. traditional chess rules, Shotgun King keeps only the size of the board of 64 squares, the methods of moving the pieces (and again, we can get rid of it – we will come back to this -), and the rules of Checkmate: when your king is likely to be taken prisoner on the next turn, and no movement allows you to escape it, it is the game over. As for you, to achieve victory, you will have to reduce the number of life points of the opposing White King to zero.
Haven’t you seen my bandolier?
It will be alone that the Black King will have to face the ranks of the White King. As with the classic game of chess, hostilities take place on a turn-by-turn basis. On each game turn, the Black King can move one space in any direction, shoot at the enemy or reload his weapon, the shotgun can only carry a limited quantity of cartridges, it will be necessary manage your ammunition otherwise you will have to lose several game turns to be able to reload serenely. If movement is limited, the Black King can count on a very practical soul capture system. By eliminating an enemy piece, you can use your soul to take advantage of its movement capabilities for one turn: if you kill a bishop, you can use your essence to move diagonally across the board, or benefit of the movement in L of the knight if one eliminated this one beforehand.
But the festivities really begin once his first salvo of enemies is defeated. Once a level has been completed, after having reduced the opponent’s White King to the state of elementary particles, the game will offer the player to choose a bonus: increase in the shooting distance, be able to move over a greater distance, increase in the number of cartridges available, appearance of bonus boxes on the board, possibilities of capturing additional souls… The title offers more than fifty bonuses of all kinds that can be used. However, this new power has its counterpart: each time you choose a bonus, the opponent will also receive one (appearance of a queen on the board, several bishops, a shield for his king… ), increasing the challenge at each level. Whites also benefit from a range of fifty random bonuses.
Battle Chess
Shotgun King deploys its concept in three game modes: Throne, Infinite and Hunt. The first requires reaching level 12 and defeating it to win the game. Each run completed allows access to a rank of increased difficulty, which range from 1 (the health walk) to 15 (a taste of hell). The Infinite mode, as its name suggests, offers an endless sequence of levels. Finally, the Hunt mode where we will suffer permanent attacks from waves of tough enemies as possible. roguelike obliges, we die a lot, and each failure (yes it was easy) sends us back to the beginning of level 1. But we always come back stronger, with increased experience, and always more know-how. Because bonuses are one thing, but to emerge victorious from the proposed challenge, it is of course on your brain that you will have to rely above all.
From an aesthetic point of view, the Punkcake Délicieux studio (Benjamin Soulé and Rémy Devaux, a very productive duo of game developers with more than fifteen titles available on itch.io in less than 2 years!) opted for an artistic direction relying on a pixel art deliberately very retro, which refers to the good times of the NES/Mega Drive generation. Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate even displays with a splendid CRT filter, transforming the game screen into a stunning virtual cathode ray tube. A video filter which we can adapt the intensity, or get rid of, by a simple turn in the options of the game.
To the annoying question, namely “to whom is addressed Shotgun King ?”, the answer is rather complex: to those who hate chess, of course; to those who love it, of course; but above all to lovers of a very high challenge. Because if the game offers a fairly clear tutorial, you must even have a minimum of chess background to be able to immerse yourself with ease in the experience designed by Punkcake Délicieux.In the radius of regrets, we can simply note the absence of a multiplayer mode, because in asymmetric the proposal could have been particularly pleasing.
Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate is now available on consoles for the modest sum of € 12.99 (special mention to the Switch version, the title wonderfully adopting the mobile game proposal). For information, the title is still available on itch.io for less than 10€, and this purchase grants you a free key for the Steam version.
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