A good way to get ahead in entertainment is by following trends. That's very evident in the world of video games, especially when it comes to the recent trend of battle royale games, which take a large number of players, usually around a hundred, and make them fight it out until there's one person standing. The battle royale genre has steadily and inexorably climbed in popularity throughout the 2010s, progressing from mods to popular games like Minecraft to monumental standalone games like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds and Fortnite. Now Ubisoft is attempting to put a spin on the genre by combining it with another recent phenomenon in multiplayer gaming: the auto battler. Might & Magic: Chess Royale is a hybrid of two of multiplayer gaming's biggest trends, and while it may not be the best of either of them, it's still a decently fun multiplayer experience.
Might & Magic: Chess Royale drops you into an arena with 99 other players and randomly assigns you an opponent to duel. The two of you get about thirty seconds to recruit minions and place them on the battlefield. When time is up, the minions go head to head and fight until one army is eradicated. The players have absolutely no control over these fights; once you've chosen your fighters and placed them how you want, all that's left is to see how it plays out.
Chess Royale uses a steady progression system to make matches more interesting as the game goes on. In the first match, you can only place two minions on the field, and the store from which you buy fighters will only be stocked with the lowest level, most basic soldiers. As the matches progress and more players get weeded out, the survivors will grow in power. As you gain levels you'll be able to deploy more minions at once, and more powerful minions will start to appear in the shop. If you buy three of the same unit they'll merge into an even more powerful one, which opens up some intriguing decisions to make as you improve your army; do you diversify your forces or double down on one useful unit in the hopes that you'll get enough to merge? It costs one gold to refresh the shop and see a brand new roster of creatures, which offers another layer of strategy. You can even spend money to buy experience, which will increase your level and potentially let you drop more units on the field and outnumber your opponent.
You start the game with 3 health points, and with the exception of the first round, you lose one health whenever you lose a match. When you run out of health, you die and are removed from the running. After the first player's death, spells are unlocked for everyone who remains. There are three tiers of spells and two are available in each tier, and they provide passive effects that can influence the tide of battle. These could be straightforward effects, like showering the enemy army in arrows every couple of seconds, or more obscure ones, like making your minions a bit more powerful if they outnumber the other army. It's another viable option to take into account when wondering how to spend your gold.
This is the biggest draw in Chess Royale; figuring out how to turn your limited funds into the best possible army with the highest chance of overwhelming your opponent. The game does a good job of offering you a wealth of options and different strategies to pursue, but it gives you very little time to sort out your strategy. Since actually fighting your opponent goes on without any input from you, the timing restriction is the biggest source of challenge in the game. It can be overwhelming, especially for a new player, to try to juggle so many choices and options into such a small window. This can be exciting once you have a handle on the game, but the tutorial does little to explain the intricacy, and thrusts you into the action of the game very quickly. Still, the learning curve is pretty generous, and it doesn't take long to pick up the basics.
For a game made for mobile release, Chess Royale looks pretty good, at least on PC. The character models of the various warriors and monsters you can recruit are interesting to look at and rendered pretty well. Ubisoft did a good job of making the creatures easy to identify at a glance, even in the chaos of the battlefield. It's also pretty easy to determine power levels based on how powerful each character looks when compared with the others, which can assist in making snap decisions in terms of troop placement. This can still be a bit of a gamble though, and if one has the time it's always worthwhile to check the stats.
Your enjoyment of Might & Magic: Chess Royale will depend more on if you're an auto battler fan than if you're a battle royale fan. It's less a true blending of the genres and more an auto battler set in a battle royale. But it's a perfectly fine auto battler, a good way to flex your strategic chops, and a nice quick diversion when you don't have anything better to do; whole 100-person games can go by in ten minutes or so. If you're interested in the genre that's taking strategic multiplayer by storm, there are worse ways to get into it than by trying Might & Magic: Chess Royale.
Might and Magic: Chess Royale releases on January 30, 2020, for iOS, Android, and PC. A digital PC code was provided to Screen Rant for purposes of review.