Chaos Combat Chess: Is it worth your time?

If you haven’t heard of the auto-battler genre, you must have been living in a rock for the past two years. It took over the gaming world in 2019, with MOBAs having their own versions of auto-battlers such as Dota 2’s Underlords, League of Legends’ Teamfight Tactics, and Mobile Legends’ Magic Chess.

Originally popularized as a Dota 2 mod by Chinese developers Drodo Studio, the game’s premise was highly inspired by Mahjong and its tile-stacking and collecting mechanic. The auto-battler’s premise was simple: stack up your units, let them battle for you, and be the last player standing. Drodo Studio went on to develop their original game called Autochess, now separate from the Valve game after a failed attempt to work with Valve in improving the game.

Since then, there have been multiple iterations of the auto-battler genre, and it has seen a lot of success as a mobile app, due to it requiring little to no heavy graphics. Today, we will be reviewing one of these auto-battler games.

Chaos Combat Chess is an auto-battler available on both PC and mobile, with the former being available on Steam and the latter on Google Play Store and the Apple App Store. It was released it mid-2020, during the rising popularity of the auto-battler genre.

Gameplay-wise, the game is alright. Not too bad, not too good, just alright. The game uses an interesting feature where you get to decide a power-up for a character when it levels up, something not present in most auto-battler games. The game could use some balancing, though, as some synergies are way too overpowered that you could literally go lossless throughout the whole game. But, the game is enjoyable in its own way that you could easily lose hours upon hours just playing it.

Design-wise, however, it isn’t doing so well. You can barely tell if there is interest accumulation from saving up gold until the next round, and the game controls are kind of clunky, even for an auto-battler.

Sometimes, the game pits you against bots. Either that, or the player base is too small that it’s literally the same players in almost every game. In the 10+ games I’ve played testing this game, I’ve met the same set of players for almost 60% of the time, and in those times I often win. So they’re either weak players, or they’re bots to help “improve” player experience. I don’t know about you, but winning against bots is never satisfying.

All in all, the game is your typical run-of-the-mill auto-battler game. It offers a lot of fun and is good for spending your free time, but it isn’t the type og game I would love to invest on, unlike those of TFT and Underlords. If I were to rank this game with the other auto-battlers I’ve played before, it would sit well at number 4, below Dota Underlords, with Chess Rush and Teamfight Tactics being top 1 and top 2 respectively.

If you want to play auto-battlers, I could recommend you to go play Teamfight Tactics, Auto Chess, or Chess Rush. Chaos Combat Chess is not worth your time, and definitely is not one game you would like to hone your auto-battling skills on.

To answer the title question, no. Chaos Combat Chess is fun to play, but it’s not worth the time that gets lost when you play it.