When I started off this morning’s “XBLIG Thursday” I had noticed that one of the very first games in the Xbox Live Indie Games queue was a game called Dragon Chess. Being a huge fan of the popular tactical strategy game, I made this my first game to check out this fine morning. Unfortunately, what I found was not what I had hoped…

Unbeknown to me, Dragon Chess is a new variation on the game of chess (I went in thinking it was going to be chess, but with dragon pieces). Apparently it’s pretty much the same as standard chess except you have two extra pawns, and two new figures called dragons. These dragons can move in any direction for up to three spaces, but can not jump over units, despite having wings.

When I found out just what type of chess this was I was, a little, disappointed. Chess, in my opinion, is one of the few games ever created which needs no fixing. It’s absolutely perfect in what it does. Still though, I ran with it. I’m open to trying new things and, all in all, the end result wasn’t terrible. In fact, the two new dragon pieces an a new layer of depth, albeit a flawed one.

Still though, the thing that got me about Dragon Chess, the one minute detail that absolutely floored me, was that the in-game pieces had no animations whatsoever. No pawns fighting pawns, or a knight running down the rook, nothing. Perhaps my expectations were too high after coming off playing Battle Chess in the mid 1990s, but this seems to be the one, and only one, reason why anybody would ever play a virtual game of chess over a real one. To not include that seems archaic, this became the status quo over a decade ago and if you expect me to pay for something then I expect to have a similar level of polish that a game 10+ years your elder does.

I know it may seem like I’m hating on Dragon Chess a little too much, and maybe I am.  But I wouldn’t be driving this fact home if I wasn’t convinced that many other people were expecting exactly what I was.

Despite all this, however, Dragon Chess, is a fairly capable chess video game. It comes with support for two players and is also said to be implementing online play later this year. So if all you’re looking for is a cheap way to play Dragon Chess (or standard chess, which is also an option) on your Xbox, then Dragon Chess is probably a worth while pick up. Just don’t go expecting any animations, like I was…

[This is not a review. This is a "first impressions" piece based on less than an hour of gameplay.]

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