Seeing this title immediately brought back fond memories of the classic Battle Chess, which was generally pretty enjoyable even if I was never very good at playing the game. Seeing the unique bit of combat for every match-up of pieces, with all sorts of creative ways they would find to kill each other, still made for an entertaining experience at least for a while. Unfortunately, that comparison does little to help Brawl Chess and the high bar set by that game made more than 20 years ago actually does it active harm. Unfortunately the brawling your pieces will do is merely a cartoony animation of a cloud of a fight, with the winner being the only one remaining. Without that hook all you’re left with is an extremely bare bones chess game that offers nothing in the way of instruction on the game and has no real flavor to speak of either. That actually leads to another bone I have to pick and that’s the inclusion of DLC for you to unlock other characters to play the game with representing your avatar. With the offering already being quite meager this prodding for some extra dough really rubbed me the wrong way. Considering there are other chess game options on the system that offer more robust features this is thus a bit of a disappointment.