Jungle (Animal Chess) is not a chess game with animal pieces as you might expect from the name but rather a new board puzzle game which reminded me of an animal survival game I once played as a child when I went to this survival camp like place.
The game is played on a board, the premise of the game is to either kill all opposing animals or get to your opponents den. There are 8 types of animal but only 4 are important. Each animal is numbered; 1 = Rat, 6 & 7 = Lion & Tiger and 8 = Elephant, an animal can only defeat an animal of equal or lower number except for rat which can defeat the elephant.
[nggtags gallery=JungleAnimalChess]
Tigers and Lions can jump over water squares, while rats can swim though them. The elephant is the equivalent of a queen in real chess in that it is the best overall piece not that it can move in all direction. All pieces can only move one square up, down, left or right. As well as Water squares, there are also Trap squares which are around the den, if an animal is in a trap space it can be defeated by any other animal regardless of their number.
The only annoying part of the gameplay is that you have to use the analogue stick, you cannot use the D-pad. There are only 7 stages to play through with 3 different difficulty levels or multiplayer. Easy is a pushover, while medium and hard provide a somewhat better challenge. Some extra stages would have been nice or the ability to play a randomly generated stages as you can progress though the game fairly fast at least on easier difficulty.
Graphically the game is strong in some areas while weaker in others. The title screen and backgrounds are pretty good. The the tiles used for the board I think they are generally a little basic, and the animal pieces themselves they could be a better. The wood block background is OK but the animal picture looks like it’s just been grabbed off the net and placed on top. The text on the menu is a little small. The music isn’t too bad and doesn’t seem to get repetitive.
At 80 :MSPoints: it’s not too bad a price and I’d probably buy it with 80 points to spare, the only real downside to it is that its somewhat short, other than that it’s a decent little puzzle game.
You can find more information as well as the trial and full versions of the game on the Xbox Marketplace.
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