Wulin Chess

My first instinct when I loaded up Wulin Chess was to check whether the tutorial was machine-translated. It mostly is, and that is the single biggest obstacle standing between this game and a wider audience. Get past it, though, and you find a tactically dense little package that earns its "Mostly Positive" standing on Steam through genuine mechanical substance rather than marketing. The core loop sits somewhere between a roguelite run-builder and a classic grid tactics game. You recruit martial hero pieces across multiple battlefields, each with distinct movement rules and attack skills, then chain them into a lineup and push through increasingly punishing encounters. What separates Wulin Chess from the genre standard is a positional damage system: back attacks, side assaults, and pressure formations all trigger bonus damage or special movement effects. Getting that geometry right on each board is the actual game. It clicks around the third or fourth run when you stop thinking about it as chess-with-HP-bars and start pre-planning your pressure lanes before the enemy phase even resolves. Terrain layers add further complexity, with obstacles, collision tiles, traps, and reward squares sitting on every map. Those traps will end careless runs, but a patient player can flip them into offensive tools. Progression runs through equipment collection and attribute cultivation, giving each hero a growth curve you actively manage between encounters. The build space is not enormous for an indie game in this genre, but there is enough variation in hero kits and gear loadouts to make successive runs feel meaningfully different rather than cosmetically reshuffled. The roguelite permanence is real, too: permadeath is in, and the difficulty curve even on the gentler settings is consistently demanding. Community reviewers have flagged that even "Mild" difficulty provides a serious challenge, which should tell you something about the expected skill floor. The weaknesses are real and worth naming clearly. The English translation remains uneven after leaving Early Access, meaning certain mechanics are only fully understood through trial, error, and community digging. The sound design is thin relative to the ink-painting art style, which is genuinely distinctive and worth noting on its own merits. UI issues, particularly large enemy sprites obscuring grid squares behind them, create occasional targeting frustration. These are polish problems rather than structural ones, and none of them break the game, but they do create unnecessary friction during the learning curve. For the player this is targeting, a tactics fan comfortable with reading between the lines of a slightly rough localisation, the mechanical reward is worth the friction. The positional combat system has real depth, the runs stay distinct, and the Chinese dark martial arts aesthetic is handled with more visual consistency than most indie games in the space manage. It is not the genre's most polished entry, but it has a specific identity and a combat system that holds up under pressure.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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