Review: Checkers Challenge

Score:
58%

Author: Absolutist

Version Reviewed: 1.0

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OK, so it's games week here on AllAboutSymbian. Checkers Challenge (and the other dozen or so titles available from the authors 'for your Symbian') was a new title to me. Absolutist are basically a games software house using a proprietary multi-platform engine to port their games between Windows, Palm, Symbian, etc. Nothing wrong with that, but an alarm bell in my head started chiming ever so quietly.

Installing Checkers Challenge provided a 'Whoa there' moment. Files were copying into place without the traditional choice of which disk to be used. For Series 60 smartphone owners short on space on disk C (and that's most of us), hard coding a sizeable game so that it can't be installed on MMC is inexcusable. OK, so Checkers is only a couple of hundred K, but others in Absolutist's range are over a Megabyte and there's no sign of a MMC-install option on any of them.

Once installed and past the obligatory splash screen, pressing either of the function keys brings up a non-standard menu, accompanied by a tacky 'boink' sound effect. This really isn't looking good. In truth, the menu itself is logical and contains the powerful 'Pick game' dialog (where you set up the level and type of game you want), but there's no attempt whatsoever to fit it to Series 60 and it's not always obvious which buttons ('tastefully' highlighted in green) are set to be activated by function or navigator keypresses. And that sound effect every time you bring the menu up. Ouch.

Onto the game itself and I thought I'd hit a bug in the interface, as the selection indicator could only be moved to squares that were illegal. Then I discovered that each keypress on the navigator was being interpreted as two presses, taking me past the legal square each time. To move one square at a time, you have to press and release the navigator incredibly quickly. This finicky technique is incredibly frustrating, even more so when you consider that in the rules of the game you're only allowed to move on the black squares. Hence finding myself jumping two at a time from white to white was irritating.

Checkers isn't the most complicated of games and the AI level was quite sufficient to give anyone a good game of 'draughts'. Or would be, if the unregistered version didn't conk out after only a handful of moves. You can't even get near crowning a piece or experiencing the fun of chasing back 'the other way'.

Registered users do get extra-hard AI, the saving of top scores and an online contest, but by this point I was past caring. Cue 'Tools | Manager | Remove'.

Sorry, Absolutist, but I give you 5 out of 10, 'Could do a lot better'.

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