The Software Toolworks' Star Wars Chess

The Good
This was a great little game that featured cartoon versions of the Star Wars cast as chess pieces. All the major classic characters were present and the music was Star Wars .wav files. The in-game animations were good and really tried hard to get laughs. When you captured a piece, the game moved to a large screen highlighting the battle and the battles were character specific. I believe each character had a few attacks and some character combinations had grander battles (Luke vs Vader).

As far as the actual chess portion, there were difficulty levels and had a two player option. Some tweaking was available for faster gameplay. This game was also ported to a few consoles.

The Bad
This was a fun game but the novelty quickly wore off. After you had seen the various animations take place, your best bet was to turn them off because gameplay was so slow. Even then it wasn't the fastest game.

The Bottom Line
A Star Wars novelty that answers that age old question: "How far can we stretch the license?"

The Good
The only reason to play this game especially when you are not into chess is to watch the animations of the Star Wars characters. You can watch Darth Vader, the Emperor, an AT-ST, a Tusken Raider, Boba Fett and a Stormtrooper take on Yoda, Chewbacca, C-3PO, Luke, Leia and R2-D2. The characters are drawn cartoon-style and the animations of the duels between them (two for each possible pair of characters depending on who wins = 72 animations) are very well made, sometimes even funny and very true to the Star Wars universe, e.g. C-3PO acts very clumsy and never wants to hurt his opponents but eventually they die by some mishap. Or when Luke battles Boba Fett he chops his head off, a hole in the ground opens up and a sarlacc arm comes out and drags the body in. Overall the graphics are well done for a 1993 computer game.

There is also voice output by the characters with some well known sentences such as "Now you know the power of the dark side", "Use the force Luke" and the chirping by R2-D2 which adds nicely to the atmosphere of the game.

If you play this just to watch the animations you will find the intuitive and easy to use board editor included very useful. Setting up a game to your wishes can be done in no time. The rest of the game and it's interface is also very intuitive and shows no weaknesses.

The Bad
If you're looking for a serious chess game you will look elsewhere quickly because it cannot deliver on this end. Even I as someone who barely knows the chess rules was able to beat the game on medium level without much thinking.

Once you know all the animations you will turn them off to speed up the game a bit and then there's nothing much left than an ordinary chess game and not a good one at that.

The Bottom Line
The game is very reminiscent of Interplay's Battle Chess but is a much worse chess game. If you're not a Star Wars fan you will not want to play this and if you are you will not like it for more than a day or so.