Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate Goes Again and Again and Again an-

gustavo

Introduction (basic rules, why sucky, background)

Concept (chess, rules, art style)

Why sucky (music, balancing, variety in guns, repetition)

Chess is a fun game on paper, but in reality, it takes so much effort to memorize every move and opening. If there’s one major flaw to chess, it is that I cannot play it casually. Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate (I will be shortening it to just Shotgun King) removes every piece but the king and gives him a shotgun. It was developed by PUNKCAKE Delicieux for a while and released on Steam on May 12, 2022. Shotgun King is the better chess in short, but something not that comparable to chess in long.

The play style of Shotgun King is quite simple. You begin with a single king with a shotgun that holds two shells for fire and six shells for storage. Similar to chess, the king moves one spot at a time and each person goes one move at a time. The main objective is to eliminate the king, and this is true for both sides. At the end of each round, you are presented with two pairs of cards, one of the cards in the pair being beneficial to you (Black pieces) and one of the cards being beneficial to the white team. Now these cards affect EVERYTHING I stated before I started rambling about cards. For instance, you could eventually dissolve into a complex king that holds one shell for fire and two for storage. You would have the ability to hop over enemies and would be granted another turn if you shot down a horse. The white team could get a card that kills the king, needing the singular king to eliminate all pieces to win. While some cards are a lame “+1 fire range” or whatever, others can be really cool and innovative. Take the blade for example: The blade is a secondary weapon that doesn’t use any ammo, but it can only be used if a piece within the king’s movement area is equal to or less than the blade damage amount. Also, there is a card that places a question mark square on the board that gives you the ability to cancel out any white cards if you touch the square. Anyways, after 10 stages of random chess games, you fight the big boy boss daddy, who is kind of easy. Wahoo, you won, but that is not the end of the game. After rank one comes rank two and after rank two comes rank three and you can probably see the pattern here. Each rank adds an extra piece or two to the white team when starting. Do not underestimate it. Once you reach rank 3, it gets challenging. Also, if you take a piece, it will be added to a special move section. That move can be played, but it counts as your turn. Once it is played, the special move will disappear and you will need to take another piece.

Shotgun King opts for a very sharp learning curve. At rank one, the game is fairly simple. Throughout the entire game, you are aided with a two-strike autocorrect chess system that guides the player through not getting checkmated. All the cards seem very complex and hard to understand, but at the end of rank one, you get most of them down. By the end of rank 3, you probably have nailed them all. Then rank three comes; “add one rook”. During rank two, it must have been a hard day if you lost on the first battle because there was no “rook”. Rank three gets real. You are kind of forced to choose only the strongest black cards and the weakest white cards. There isn’t much room for experimentation or a little bit of goofing tomfoolery shenanigans around. The game here gets repetitive. Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating, but the gameplay gets a tad stale during this era. But other than that and the card balance, the game is pretty fun! The art style is a really cool retro pixel style, and the sound effects are VERY satisfying. The soundtrack isn’t something groundbreaking, but the entire game has a nice little charm to it. I forgot to mention other modes, but I think rank battles best sums up the game (Also I haven’t unlocked the modes). In all, Shotgun King is a very unique take on the age-old game of chess and offers hours of exciting gameplay and visuals before rank 3.