Chain Clash's Punches Lack Real Impact (Review)

REVIEW - Chain Clash is a blockchain-powered fighting game on the EOS blockchain. Players select an avatar and pledge their allegiance to one of the crypto-inspired factions. After that come training sessions and battles that aren't much more than menus and data. The game lacks the visual representation to really care about the combat.

Chain Clash has been on the market for two weeks. During my play time Apple decided to no longer allow the dapp browser within the EOS Wombat wallet, forcing me to play Chain Clash from my PC browser. Sure, I could've played through my mobile browser as well, but that felt so cumbersome.

The good news is that Chain Clash is completely free. Anybody can start playing Chain Clash by choosing a free avatar. Any additional avatars need to be paid for. As soon as you've got your avatar, the game can begin.

An interface without clashes

The interface from this mobile-first game is pretty smooth. The dojo is the main page from where players can train their characters to increase their powers, and have them battle opponents with a similar ranking on the global leaderboards. Also all player-owned items can be found on this page.

From the dojo players can access the avatar pages, which shows the numbers behind the four attributes: strength, resilience, agility and wisdom. Here users can change the fighting strategy, boost the avatar's powers, and train him.

From the store users are able to buy more items and avatars. Items allow players to train their fighters, regenerate health, revive them or give them a proper name. Each of these items can be bought in batch and is priced between 0.1 and 0.5 EOS a piece. Again, it's a friendly interface.

A common avatar costs 0.50 EOS, a rare one is 2 EOS, while the epic avatars are 5 EOS. In addition there are celebrity-inspired avatars, like John McAfee, that were only available in the pre-sale. These celebrity avatars were selling for hundreds of dollars, and its likely that Chainwise will add more celebs to their game.

If you don't want to pay, you can just wait for your health to regenerate. If your fighter dies after battling too much, it will take 24 hours for him to revive. Even training tickets can be earned in the game by completing daily challenges and quests, which are mostly about winning a few matches against an a character from a certain faction. This underlines that Chain Clash is playable without investing anything, even though it's very likely non-paying gamers need to have more patience.

Combat lacking punch

The thing that bothered me most about Chain Clash is the lack of active gameplay. You level up your character and train his strength, resilience, agility and wisdom. These attributes work well for certain moves. Anyone can imagine that resilience improves an avatar's blocking skills, while power improves punching strength. Agility and wisdom are likely to influence both defensive and offensive moves, but this never became very clear to me.

For each character a player can select default moves. These are three offensive and three defensive moves. Whether the avatar grabs, kicks or punches, is up to the player. The same for the high or low blocks. There's no way an avatar can attack or block twice in a row. This makes combat feel restricted.

In addition you never really get to see your moves in action. After selecting the moves, it takes twenty seconds of waiting time to (hopefully) find an opponent. You get to see the move sets of both avatars, followed by a screen showing the results. There's no visual representation of the fight what so ever, even though German developer Chainwise is working to add this feature this month.

As a result this makes combat feel generic and meaningless at the moment. You just need to level up your character and make it as strong as possible, while hoping you pick the right moves to beat your opponent.

Coming up for Chain Clash

Even though I don't really enjoy Chain Clash in its current form, I won't give my hopes up yet. Personally I would love to see more depth and unpredictability in the combat. For example, it would be great if players get to spend action points during a fight. These points could be used for defensive or offensive moves, which would be the player's choice. Some moves require multiple points, but they will also have a bigger impact. A mechanic like this would make the fights more dynamic and interesting. Combine that with a 3D representation of the fight itself, and we're talking about a completely new game.

Thankfully the story doesn't end with this version of Chain Clash. The studio has some updates planned. In addition this is just the first product in a bigger series in which players get to use their avatars across multiple games. For example game studio Chainwise is also working on an arcade fighting game, comparable with games like Tekken and Street Fighter. They are calling this Chain Clash Arcade. That would be the type of Chain Clash I want to play, and this current version is just a soft introduction into what's to come.